


To Scatter Amongst the Stars

by kharisei



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe, Amaurotine Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Dom/sub Undertones, Dreams, F/M, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Mental Instability, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Past Lives, Pining, Porn with Feelings, References to Depression, Romantic Fluff, Sexual Tension, Soul Bond, Substance Abuse, Tempering (Final Fantasy XIV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:28:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 44,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21640960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kharisei/pseuds/kharisei
Summary: "Not that you would remember any of this."A retelling of the intriguing scene at the Ladder and what could have followed after.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch & Warrior of Light, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Reader, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 82
Kudos: 315





	1. the paradox

**Author's Note:**

> I have always thought the scene at the Ladder, where Emet-Selch speaks to the WoL of Amaurot, was all a bit wistfully romantic. This story picks up right after he calls the WoL out. The content is tame, for now.

“Not that you would remember any of this.”

The words strike with a certain disenchantment that rouses you to almost repeat the question back, to simply ask what he meant by it.

Almost…

Though why did it feel and sound like Emet-Selch was just communing with an old friend?

Up until this point, you had remained detached and stoic as it has ever been your most favoured mask. You had gone with safe, quiet, obedient, _subservient_. Even as you are destroying your being with every turn against the burgeoning Light, still you have maintained a semblance of equanimity.

You have long grown weary of falling in line and allowing everyone to speak for you—and for you to fight their battles, no questions asked. Never once to turn the stone over to catch a glimpse of the other side. To see that there exist two sides to every coin, and mayhap Hydaelyn does not hold all of the answers.

If you are to turn a blind eye and play the part, you know full well how this tale would be written. In any case, the two of you are pitted against one another with opposing deities and Mt. Gulg is just another skip in the pond to the stone that is driving toward one or perhaps both of your deaths.

Then again, so is this tête-à-tête. The moment the words passed from his lips, they had been stillborn and destined to wither away with time along with all his memories. A forgotten colloquy weathered down to hollow prattle, as you would fight on ever as the reputed hero. Blade hanging from hip, your silhouette would stride into the horizon to leave him to the dust drawn from the bones of his brethren.

Something deeply rooted and worming itself from within calls for you to cease the trend, to give utterance to your reservations. Of course, you do not truly remember of what he spake. You have had dreams and such, incoherent fragments of another lifetime within a strange city. A bustling medley of those soaring spires, though naught else to string together to form a proper memory. Yet perhaps…

“What is your name?” Your tongue betrays you, though it is easy to surmise that he will deflect besides.

Emet-Selch crinkles his brow, and then crosses his arms. He carries that same look of plain lassitude, shoulders ever slumped.

“Have we not had this discussion just a little while ago, hero? There _may_ come a day when I reveal my true name but alas, ‘tis not the day.” He mutters this with nonchalance, lifting a gloved hand to waft at the air as though brushing you off like a fly. But then again, there is that despondence that passes over his pale eyes as he does so, which only serves to pique your curiosity even more.

“I do not understand why you keep it so guarded. Is it embarrassing?” you tease, the beginnings of a coy smile playing at your lips.

The Ascian scoffs, turning to fully face you from his otherwise slouched, impartial posture. “Are you _toying_ with me? Have you given any thought that I may not deem you worthy of it?” He looks at you sharply but his tone does not suggest a notion of anger; rather, it lilts into a pensive timbre.

The smile does not fall from your face, and the words tumble from your throat unbidden. “I am not sure. Why don’t you tell me? What is _your_ game, Ascian?”

Thoughtlessly, you step closer to him. “If I am not worthy, then why do you speak to me the way you do? Why do you _look_ at me the way you do? Like we have known one another for ages.” The last statement is said quietly as your eyes settle to his golden orbs, aglow with the unabashed Light polluting the scape of Kholusia.

To the myriad of denizens and adventurers alike in the distance, adamantly toiling with the Talos for the Ladder, they would not notice the twist in the air between the two of you. And to the untrained eye, one would likely not notice the subtle shift in Emet-Selch’s countenance nor comportment, as he gazes back at you. Yet it is made manifest, just beneath the surface.

How his crimson lips relax just so enough to part, with stunted breath exhaling out into the stillness. His eyes search your face for a fleeting half-moment, a gesture stolen so quickly that if you had blinked a fraction too long—you would have missed it. Something about his stance unfurls just barely, leaving him exposed and you have to think that you had struck a nerve somewhere.

His hand then raises, lavishly adorned arm stretching outward in a sweeping motion and it appears as if he is enacting one of his iconic, theatrical flourishes. You very nearly snort at him but are abruptly silenced.

Quite suddenly, something firmly grasps onto your hand at your side and it is embarrassing to note how long it takes for you to determine that it is Emet-Selch’s hand. The cool silk smoothly pulls over the bare skin of your knuckles, hooking around your palm and then tugging you forward. Your eyes, once fixated on your own trembling fingers, flutter upwards to his face as he pulls you close and your heart makes a mad dash with the motion. His hold against your flesh paired with the look in his eyes speaks of untold resolve.

“I fashioned a shroud of sorts to conceal our movements so that no one may see us. Come, let us speak in private,” the Ascian utters insistently, taking a broad gait to a nearby storage building and practically yanking you along with him.

“W-what?! No, what in the hells!” you sputter out as he hauls you off like it is nothing, with indifference to your pleas.

Your mind is a scramble of thoughts, head jerking back to where everyone is laboring away—backs turned and completely ignorant. “By the Twelve, just _what_ are you doing!” You try to wrench your hand back, to no avail. The man is much stronger than he looks.

Emet-Selch heaves out an exasperated sigh, though promptly stopping to turn and face you in earnest. “There is an item of paramount importance that we _must_ discuss. It may come as a shock and, for the sake of preserving your veneer of insouciance, it is best to speak without the audience of your newfound followers. Please, come.” His eyes level with yours as his voice rings out with such conviction, nigh imploring in its intonation.

A light breeze catches his burgundy tresses, blowing through softly to the lustrous white of his bangs. The way he looks at you sets a blaze along your cheeks, more so as his focus drifts to your lips momentarily. A small smile of reassurance and a slight squeeze to your hand then swiftly sends your cheeks into a combustion of flames. And you can only shuffle along blindly in tow behind the building. You sheepishly snap out of the daze when he releases your hand, and peek from behind the corner of stone out of sheer prudence. Alas, everyone is none the wiser.

Crossing arms as you turn back to the man, you press your lips into a tight frown. “Okay, Emet. Out with it. What is this _item of paramount impor_ —“ But your little play of mockery is interrupted as his broad chest collides into yours and large arms come to wrap thoroughly around your form.

Rich tufts of fur tickle against your cheek. The fine gilded trimmings of his regalia press and chill along your collarbone, through your cloth armor. You should pull away, but your body melts flush into his and staggering warmth sweeps through leaving you nigh breathless in his embrace.

“Do not fight Vauthry,” comes the whispered and muffled prayer teetering on command, Emet-Selch’s face virtually buried into your hair and shoulder. You can feel his chest swell powerfully against yours with heavy breath.

Your emotional state is turbulent at best, wanting to tear yourself away but wanting so much more to remain in his arms. Before you realise, your arms loosen and slowly you slide your hands up his shoulders, fingers tangling into the impossibly soft fur of his collar. It takes some time for the confusion to sink in with his words.

“What… what do you mean?” The wavering rasp that escapes your lips only adds to your turmoil, and the man’s hold on you only becomes more snug.

“You will not be able to withstand it, dear hero. You cannot see it…” His voice is solemn, coloured with concern as his hands come to rest at your waist. A shudder ripples beneath your rib as he pulls himself away enough to look down upon you. His cool amber eyes dance along your face before locking to your own eyes, which are half-lidded and now stinging with unchecked tears. “The rifts within your soul are only worsening, and by the hour. If you continue on…” He trails off, one hand moving up to rest along your jawline and you feel the soft silk brush against your earlobe with the motion. You shiver beneath his touch.

“I do not want to lose you.”

A thickened sob coils at the back of your throat to the confession and you cannot help but to gasp from the overwhelming force of it. Fingers clenched into fur in a trembling grasp, you lamely shake your head as if your refusal would make a difference.

What is this?

_Who is he?_

_**Is this a trick?**_

Feeling like a trapped animal, you grit your teeth and shove him away at his shoulders. You are brusque and cruel with the movement, though Emet-Selch allows himself to be pushed back. He looks as if it was to be expected and a calm wistfulness paints over his features as he watches you uselessly attempt to compose yourself. Your hand rests over your eyes as you slump against the stone wall of the building, a portrait of defeat.

“What is this, Emet? Why are you doing this…” Your words get choked back as unsought tears trickle hot and unforgiving along your skin.

There is no use in hiding them, but you do not understand why they are even there. This is your adversary, not your friend or _lover_. Why does it feel like you are splitting apart at the seams in this moment, and not just from the Light?

Emet-Selch stands quietly as if in reflection. The damnable tears cloud your vision, only compounded by the dark shadows cast from the rickety eaves of the building you lean against. Still yet, it is a look of dolor that passes over his features as he shifts his gaze to meet yours. His chin tilts down while he rakes a gloved hand through his hair, such a mortal gesture it is.

“What I am about to say is not going to make sense, but you need only to listen,” he says as he takes a step closer.

You do not respond, quickly averting your eyes from his and crossing your arms in a vain effort to somehow steel yourself. Deep down within your marrow, there is a painful and disturbing notion that you will not like what he is about to say.

The Ascian sighs softly. “By Zodiark, I know naught of what I am doing by telling you this. I simply cannot bear to see your soul… your _radiant_ light burn out from this tireless, ruinous path you are set upon. I cannot condone it any longer.”

You have always loved the sound of his voice.

The words are hushed out in a low tone, a harmonious cadence that would have otherwise been soothing if not for their context. But instead, you find yourself clawing your fingernails into the muscle just above your elbow, gouging dreary little half-moons into the flesh amongst the scattering of scars with your tension. Just the same, a part of you cannot help but feel slightly faint by how he just described your soul.

He edges closer, coming to rest against the building beside you but careful not to crowd you.

“I once told you before that I have long waited for a soul as strong as yours to be able to endure the necessary pain, for a path of lesser tragedy. I did not tell you that it was always you—your soul.”

You cannot help but to snap your neck back to look at him as he speaks, though his head is canted down with eyes gently closed. They slowly open beneath dark lashes, as he seems to sense you watching him and then their intense golden chroma slowly drifts to smoulder into yours.

“That I have waited for a time when you would be strong enough, over the eons to find a way through this together,” he says gently and the breath is stilled in your lungs. Your head is bursting with ache and the tears are still falling, soaking along through the fine hair at your temple as you cast your eyes aloft to the brazen sky.

“I do not understand.” Your words sound like mindless babble through the heaviness in your throat.

A soft veil flows down upon you in this moment, swathing over and replete with warmth. It twists and plaits through your aether, cradling and bearing comfort to your distraught state. It feels rather like a soft embrace, an affectionate hug. And it feels so right, so ordinary to pull your gaze from the harsh skies and see his own broken, troubled regard for you while he broods over what to say. None of it makes any sense, and yet somehow it does.

The balmy breeze whispers cool along the wet trails on your skin and suddenly Emet-Selch reaches to grasp your hand, cupping it with both of his much larger ones. You suck in a bleating breath of air but do not pull away.

“I fear for your safety, your life,” he murmurs emphatically, squeezing your hand with each syllable expressed. “Your friends are blinded in their ambition. They do not see how near you are to the precipice.” His piercing eyes search over yours, and he dares to step closer to where you have to raise your chin to look up at his pained countenance.

“I am the hero, and it is my duty.” It is said with tiredness, a rotting dead horse dragged and beaten to the bone. “What else is there for me?”

Emet-Selch sighs, bringing the silk of his fingers to again graze at your jawline, weaving ever so into the dampened hair at your temple. “Let me save you.”

A fresh set of hot tears seeps over your skin, pooling and becoming steeped into his fine gloves.

“I can reverse the damage that the Light has already wrought upon you. I can draw it into myself, mend the fractures of your soul and you can walk away from this, unscathed.”

Your brow wrenches up in confusion, shaking your chin weakly. “But _why_? Why would you do that? And what of Vauthry?”

Every cell and synapse within your body, every wisp of your aether, every spark of your soul screams that he is not of your world and purpose—he, a child of Zodiark. Why would he set everything aside to save you? Damn his god and save a child of Hydaelyn?

He cares for you, that much is certain.

Darkness sheathes over his eyes to your words and your thoughts are far too muddled to construe its meaning. Gently the Ascian presses his forehead to yours, and the soft impression of his third eye settles into your skin. His nose brushes just against yours, though his lips remain at a restrained distance while his fingers continue to nestle into the hair just around your ears. You exhale and your eyelids fall closed, relishing in his touch.

“Please trust me. Let me fix this.” The breathless whisper comes so quietly, nigh as muted as the unsteady nod of your assent.

Just as you open your eyes again, your heart drops when you hear a cacophony of cheering in the background. An afterthought buzzes to the back of your mind as you pull away from Emet-Selch; his lips had been so close, and you are sure he was not the only one breaching the breadth of space. You spin your head around behind you, partly in hopes to hide the maddening heated flush along your entire face.

Alisaie’s voice is calling your name. You can infer that the Ladder is repaired, and of course your presence is needed.

“I’ll come find you later,” Emet-Selch assures as you turn your gaze back to him, a small smile of ease to his lips.

Before you can say or do anything more, twisted shadows of violet and raven bleed from thin air.

And then the Ascian walks away, vanishing into the void and leaving you to the chaos of your mind.

You had not even gotten his real name.


	2. the tide

_A relentless heat draws and spills forth over your skin, prompting your eyelids to slowly crack open to glowing effulgence which basks the span of the bedroom. The light of dawn breaks through the bounds of shades to lofty windows, hazing a surreal sheen of brilliance to the charming oriel. Amidst the streams of light, miniscule motes of dust quiver about to hang free and float upon the air—dancing to some nameless, faraway tune._

_Loudly groaning in vexation, you hastily snatch the coverlet and sheets to wrap tight over your head, long hair tousled into an utter mess with your disorderly slumber._

_You are most definitely_ **not** _a morning person._

_After lying quietly for a few moments with naught but the sound of the steady fall of your breath, there is a faint tickling sensation of warmth that gathers around your bare foot, now hung from the edge of the bed. It climbs from the top of your toes, then grazing smooth over the ankle and up under the covers to crawl past your calve._

_“Mmmhmm…” Your moan becomes muffled into the pillow, more cross than content._

_Just as you make the move to kick your foot towards the unwelcome intruder, a rich and resonant laughter peals through the silent room. Warm hands grasp at your wayward limbs, sliding up tingling skin under the sheets to the velvet expanse of your thighs to then flip you over. A squeal springs from your mouth and you attempt to ball yourself up, only for your knees to be pinned down and the heat of a body to slide over your naked flesh—a path of sweet featherlight kisses trailed in its wake. Still, your eyes remain closed while your lips languidly curl at the corner, feeling the exquisite press of weight upon your form._

_Another moan is plucked from your lungs, though now more deep and carnal as you feel teeth and tongue break from those kisses. Hot breath ghosts over your navel and between your breasts, the silk touch of skin against skin coaxing your eyes open to a sea of wintry white framing eyes of the most familiar gold._

_And then a kiss, his mouth against yours…_

...

..

.

A ruddied eclipse of black devours and shadows over the blithe illusion.

“Hhaaa—“ You hush out breathlessly over chapped lips as you grudgingly stir from the dream, thrust and spurned back into the waking world. 

Your eyes tear themselves open to glaring, merciless heavens, and the echoing crash of waves against the rocky shoreline rings deafening to your eardrums. There is a thunderous and sharp thrumming in your chest, sparring in crescendo to the sounds of the surf. 

The once bated breath within your ribcage now convulses through with agony as you sluggishly haul your weight to your elbows. It twists itself into a heavy coughing spell, rattling through your viscera until a ghastly, nitid ichor chokes up along your burning throat. When you spew the Light from your lungs, it sizzles and pops against the grit of sand with a sickening noise. You can only fall back down to the gravelly seashore with a weariness beyond the years you have held, and attempt to ignore the bitter taste coating your tongue.

Throwing a forearm over your brow to ward out the parody of sunlight, that unforeseen dream quickly swallows all thought. 

So cloudless and intense and _honest_ … as a memory. It was not as the other dreams, before so cryptic and broken. 

And those eyes, you **_know_ ** those eyes.

For a while, you just lay there on the distant strand of coast in Kholusia, somewhere near Whisperwind Cove. You could not be around the others, not now. And you do not particularly feel guilty about it.

Emet-Selch discovers you like this, sprawled out in solitude as you attempt to bite back the racing advent of tears. You do not notice him as he treads towards you over the gray and bleak shore, soft footfall rendered silent to the whims of the cosmos. 

“My, my. It must be quite pleasant to idle your time away on the beach whilst all your cohorts are off slaving themselves,” the Ascian remarks as he comes to halt a couple of fulms from where you rest. “Did I not find you in much of the same state when last we met?” His tone is teasing and playful—masking a deep anxiety that you cannot fathom.

Quickly you lift your arm aloft, squinting at his darkened form amidst the bleached white skies. Seeing him brings a sense of calm that is indescribable. You heavily sigh, a shaken titter slipping from the ache of your breast before you throw him a faint smile.

“Such are the ways of conquerors.” 

A little smirk plays along his lips, one that reaches his eyes as he looks down at you. For some reason, it is a little smirk that warms the blood beneath your veins and blurs any coherent line of thinking into disarray. And then you quite suddenly remember your last conversation with the man, and your heart is hammering at the rib with what seems to be exponential force. 

In a mindless attempt to challenge the unease, you pat at the dark and pebbly sand beside you. “Care to join me?” 

Emet-Selch balks at your invitation to sit on the bare ground, a look of horror upon his countenance that could be _nicely_ described as overtly melodramatic. “I am not some savage!” 

Of course not.

A snap of the finger and an absurdly extravagant blanket of sorts lays just adjacent to where you sit. He settles down upon it with no small measure of grace, _somehow_ with all of those robes and skirts ruffling about. And then he looks to you with those eyes the colour of rich amber and softly pats the plush fabric beside him—that same smirk pressed at the lips as before. 

Ever the ass.

It feels as if you have entered into a trance when you nervously adjust on the sable blanket, coming to sit beside him with knees drawn up to the chin and just over a good fulm away. How much of a juvenile you must appear as your body rocks and teeters with your chaotic distraction. Again, your mind mulls over the prior exchange and the intimacy shared. 

And that dream…

“Speak your mind, hero.” The pitch is gentle and quiet, needling through your haze of thoughts all the same.

With diffidence, your eye cuts over from beneath low lashes to see the Ascian gazing out at the water. He sits with one knee propped up and the other leg resting below. An arm is braced at the knee, silk covered fingers touched upon the carved line to his mandible. The winds from the sea flow along sleek through his hair, its wine colour shimmering with the white. 

And you nearly choke on apparent drool when his focus breaks from the scenery to rest on you, a polished eyebrow arced along a pool of gold. Quickly you attempt to compose yourself, clearing your throat as discreetly as could be managed. 

“Tell me, Emet.” Stamping down the humility, you turn your head to face the man squarely. “Have you always had that hair colour?” The question is innocent enough.

He remains silent for some time, holding your gaze with a trace of a smile. “After all that has been said, _that_ is what is on your mind?” A method of digression, it would seem.

There is a slight tremor in your movements as you turn to fully face Emet-Selch, a notion churning in the pit of your stomach that you are perhaps making a mistake. You are afraid to put speech to your feelings—feelings which are spiralling out of your control at the moment. 

He wants to save you; he confessed this explicitly not a day past. 

And yes, all of your comrades are busy in Tomra whilst trying to assemble plans on how to reach Mt. Gulg. And here you are, sitting on a beach with the inveterate enemy—whittling precious time away with a renegade fancy to be closer to him, despite all of the warnings blaring off in your skull.

Why is he here? 

Why does he care so much?

Why do **_you_** care so much?

A whisper of strangled breath... 

The brine of the breeze clung to your lips... 

Nails clutched tight and cut into the flesh of your palms...

The tug of your eyes to his.

“What am I to you?”

It is the drop of a pendulum swinging, the fall of his answer so sure to follow your words. 

Something burns wildly within those gilded irises. 

Emet-Selch moves a hand to grasp at your wrist, your fingers instantly relaxing from tension under the delicate silk. He then leans with the other hand splayed into the blanket, until his lips are against yours in the barest of touches. It is a fragile and sweet thing at first. The supple skin of his mouth brushes just over your shivering lips, sharp jaw angled ever so slight and eyes drifting to close. 

You can scarce breathe from shock. And then his hand at your wrist trails up to your neck, fingers lacing into the hair behind your ear and through towards the nape. The kiss deepens no sooner than his tongue skims along the pout of your lip, trembling skin giving way to the ebb and flow of his soft caress.

Without thinking, an arm wraps around his neck and then the other follows suit. A muted moan releases upon his mouth, whereupon the hold on you strengthens and pulls your body closer. Before either of you realise, you are in his lap and straddling him flush at the hip. 

The kiss is bruising, intoxicating. 

And it feels so right. Even out in broad (forged) daylight. Where _anyone_ could spy.

As you break away for air, the Ascian wastes no time in dragging his lips down your neck. Your fingers are wrenching at the fine fur of his jacket, no doubt ripping it to ruin. The thoughts teeming through your brain make no sense, a deranged blur of bliss and promise twisted through with regret and loss. 

Hushed whispers of yearning fall from his breath—how beautiful your soul is, how long he has waited, how much he _needs_ you. 

Soon you feel your body being lowered down onto the plush weave of the blanket, the thrilling stroke of his silken bangs at your neck as his mouth sucks and scorches over the flesh of your throat. Your hands are now buried in his tresses and you want, you _need_ to be closer. 

A hand pulls from his hair and your fingers begin to fumble at the closure to your tunic, to free the burning skin to Emet-Selch’s attentions. Sharp teeth catch at your collarbone as the crisp and pointed sound of the zipper rends itself through the roaring clash of the moving tide. 

His whispers bend and contort into something foreign, a hollowed string of bells and warbles that prickles over your perception, your consciousness. A shallow gasp breaks from your breast as your brain catches up with your body, and you find yourself dragging away from beneath him in desperation. All of your senses, overwrought. 

That sound, so familiar and so frightening all at once. 

Your eyes lock onto his as you stagger over the blanket and into the coarse sand. The sharpened edges of shale splice through your cognizance even more and your vision blurs with tears. Your chest is heaving and so is his. You wonder how an immortal being such as he could even be so affected. But he is. His body shudders just as yours, lush robes spread out over his hunched form as he rests upon his knees as if in prayer. 

Resolve settles down into your bones as you rise from the sands, figurative walls nailing themselves shut. 

“I do not need your saving. I can do this on my own.”

A sad and feeble admission—one you can scarce believe yourself. As it is said, a hatred brews for your lack of mettle though you walk on just the same, fingers clamped at the whistle in your pocket to summon your chocobo to chase you away. 

You do not hear the Ascian stagger from the shore, rushing after your shadow. 

He sees the Light for what it is, the monstrosity of it.

The supremacy of it.

Swallowing your soul.

The brimming Light surges to the surface and strikes you the fool for your words. It splinters itself, lodging stabbing nettles of savage pain from the inside. Your steps become burdened while you attempt to mask the floundering, erratic movements of your limbs. Errant tears sting into your eyes as the Light coils and spasms your heart into a wicked vise. The air is snagged ruthless from your lungs.

Just as your knee gives out from under, a warmth envelops your frame as you fall.

“ _What_ are you doing?!” The panicked murmur clings and breathes hot into your skin.

Emet-Selch cradles your limp form bridal-style, or at least that is what it feels like. 

For you can no longer see.

The echoes of the rolling sea become muted, waning into shrieking silence as you drift off into the pale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone for reading this indulgent thing, dropping all those kudos and comments is quite encouraging! I'll likely be updating more of the tags with the next chapter.


	3. his eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I got a tad carried away with the length here. But no regrets lol. Please take note of the new rating and tags. I also updated the archive warning, to be safe. This chapter is dark and is primarily written from Emet-Selch's perspective, while still sticking mostly with 2nd person. Hopefully you will feel that it reads smoothly. I have trickled a little bit of head canon here that will feed into the rest of the story.

A mirror of a most glorious city, sunken beneath the far reaches of the deep. 

Thoroughly lost in its own right, just as the fallen Amaurot those many millennia ago. 

Emet-Selch carries you here, hides and steals your blighted soul away with its shattered stasis. So weak, so _depressing_. The fissures themselves loop and weave like delicate cobwebs, at the verge of fraying away into some macabre nightmare. 

Seeing you in such a state renders the Ascian shaken, unleashing a fear so vast—so concrete and crippling. A fear that he had not lived through since before the Sundering. 

When he witnessed that fair glimmer burn out in your eyes. When all had been lost. 

The beginning to his end.

* * *

So it had come.

Terminus.

The sheer horror of it. The shrill screams and the violence, clotted blood and sinew painted richly upon the ground like a sinister canvas. The metallic stench of carnage hung heavy in the dead air while foul, inconceivable beasts shorn through the city and far beyond. 

No bias had been granted toward those who were slain. There was no proclivity to choose between one poor soul over the other, of youthful bounds or senescent. It was an apathetic power that held sway over the bloodletting. And what did it matter when half their number was to be paid as debt to Him? It was naught but a score to tally, to summon a savior for their dying star. A means to an end.

Tiny howls of terror rippled and reeled along over the threadbare, broken cries of the more timeworn. Those who dared to intervene were hacked asunder, and it was a great many. The mound of corpses towered high in the face of havoc and mayhap the only slight favor afforded was that the masks helped to screen out the twisted visages of hysteria. At least, as much as could be expected with such brutality. Bodies were crushed or flung far wide, their quaint robes tattered to shreds from misshapen claws and teeth as freakishly long as they were razor-edged. What was left was little more than mutilated, broken remains which lay naked and motionless, blank eyes caked with ash and crimson.

It was murder, written plain and true throughout the melting horizon. The first of many sins to follow.

And how could they have known that half would not sate His thirst? 

How could **_he_** have known?

_If only he had listened._

As a member of the Convocation, the circle of great luminaries who had assented for the grisly offering, Hades found himself dead inside from the undertaking. It went without saying that all of them had been hollowed to empty shells, all at their own stride. Some thrived with the challenge more than others. For him, it had struck at the forefront. And how much he had scraped and struggled, at his wit’s end to try to find another answer. So many endless days of no sleep, no food, no shred of respite to toil for some other way--any other damned way to avoid such an atrocity, such an unthinkable and irredeemable evil. 

Alas, there was none. The sound that had rent itself from the core had grown solid and deafening, an imminent Calamity in the making. So they offered that first bounty of blood and said calamity had been averted it seemed.

And it came to be that after all that was lost, more strife was still yet to come.

A gouged and hellish scape had rooted itself from the scourged land. The very forces of nature had been smote. The water, soil, air—all of it, tainted and diseased. The water was unclean, poisoned really—requiring large stores of aether to distill the deadly impurities. Nothing would grow in the barren dirt before withering limp and decayed. And the wind lay still and lifeless, the very air itself thick and curdled with putrid smog which would not lift nor fall away. 

It took immeasurable amounts of magicks just to replenish enough to survive with such conditions. And no amount of aether seemed to have been enough to set the star upon the right course. Just as no amount of minds joined together had been enough to find a solution for it.

No matter that, in the midst of this, there were the broken families—riven into replete madness with the loss of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, children and grandparents. Lost companions, friends, colleagues--shoveled and stacked neat onto the heaping pile of blood-soaked immolation for their newfound deity.

Zodiark then offered another solution to the tormented scape of the star, albeit a wretched thing that would make one’s stomach turn.

Though little did they know, a dark kernel bore itself deep within each who had participated with the Summoning those months ago. Within each, it would take root a different form—leech and glut from that which was only unique to a given individual’s soul. All who had taken part would be affected to some degree by penitence for what would be perceived as a sin in the taking of lives, even with the notion of a greater good for the star. And that seed of shadow would first prey upon this, to then linger and grow within. Such was the wont of this entity created by faith, morphed from the fractured nature of even these most ancient, exemplary beings—vulnerable to love and hate all the same. But never would it truly temper their will, unless the nature of the soul bade it to do so.

And it seemed that everyone had to accept the facts for what they were, once it had become so obvious that a second sacrifice would need to be delivered for any hope of survival in the least. Elidibus had always been most pragmatic and, as the Emissary, bore a strong influence on the others. With Lahabrea as Speaker, they were able to hush any fears or doubts, and gather the Convocation to stand tall to take the next step. 

Elidibus had remained sedate, whereas Lahabrea had remained tenacious—all while Emet-Selch was naught more than a ticking time bomb.

More death, more despair and suffering laid heavily upon the people. The remaining half of the living were cut by half once more.

The skies cleared and shone bright, the water flowed pure and pristine. Tiny buds of flora began to sprout through the sweep of land, while the fauna slowly creeped back from hiding. It seemed that the star was finally healing and beginning anew, such as a butterfly bursting forth from its cocoon.

Be that as it may, a second reaping was _again_ not enough. For Zodiark then promised that if they were to bestow yet a _third_ offering, all of their lost brethren would be returned. 

The bloodied wager ran the steepest of stakes, from whichever side one were to chance a glance.

And it was then that a new band of individuals had emerged. To summon something mighty enough to eclipse and blind that dark passage.

* * *

_On a day just before the end..._

Hades sat slumped and crumpled at his desk, reclined back with eyes drawn half-closed in fatigue. Long-forgotten memorandums and blueprints laid riddled and haphazard before him, from another age with another purpose. An age where this office had been a bustling centre of thrilling design and concepts, to forge an unfailing aspiration for his people. And now, these papers only gathered thick dust from the staleness of the room—never to see the light of day.

The loss had settled deep within Hades’s soul and the contrition for his sins had devoured him into silence. He had always been a tad laconic, especially before he met you. Although then, the sea of souls that flowed before his aurum eyes had been much to blame. Its vivid, resplendent hues spun wisps of striking beauty as he watched their unique essence wane and wax, to and fro along the skies until tipping into the Underworld. There was no other but one who could see like he, a good friend who also _annoyed_ him to no end.

But when you came into his lonely life, it was as if you had set him aflame. Your soul was of the most exquisite wash of colour he had ever seen, and your laughter was so sinfully contagious. He thrived from telling you of the distinctive lives that he saw within these streams of prismatic glow. It was best in the evening, as the two of you would lay out under the dimming night sky. There, you would settle your head in his lap and he would weave his vision into enchanting tales borrowed from the real world—some happy, some sad. More often than not, you two would spend hours like this until you fell asleep under the stars, draped over Hades’s body as a toasty blanket. 

Now, even his keen sight had become a source of sorrow. The heavens had become a whirling kaleidoscope of colour over these many long months, with the death of multitudes. Nothing to admire there.

And he could not find any true rest. Not even in his home, for it was no longer a place of comfort. Not without _you,_ his bonded and beloved. So he had resigned to returning back to his vacated office from whence he had held the highest regard and pride from you, when passions aligned and the serenity felt timeless. He absorbed himself in it, to blot his mind out, to forget. And sleep. 

‘Twas for naught. There was no forgetting as reality only bled into nightmares in both solitude and slumber. Heavy rings of shadow hung from his eyes and there was no amount of repose that would mend this wrong. 

And without you, he felt he could not breathe.

As the Fourteenth member of the Convocation, you had abandoned your seat before any blood had been shed. You could not accept the culling of any life for death, let alone an outright massacre of monstrous proportions.

For a time, the two of you had worked alongside one another, searching for ways to fix all of the telltale signs of the impending Calamity. The problem was that you both had not realised what you were up against. No one did, at first. For all of the grinding years spent trying to right creation magicks gone amok, it seemed that there was no end in sight. The most grotesque creatures would spawn out of thin air and, for every beast that was butchered and blazed, a dozen more would rise from its ashes. 

It was unceasing and terrifying and _exhausting_. These beings plucked from the fear manifested out of nightmares, it cycled night and day—non-stop as an infernal feedback loop of disaster. And it only grew worse, spreading from across the seas and beginning to take a rotted bloom within Amaurot itself. 

That was when the real panic had sunken down to the bone.

Leading up to the first of the sacrifices, there had been so many fights. So many tears and disappointments. You both had screamed at one another until there was nothing left. 

Hades keenly remembered one of the last spats that the two of you had shared. It was just after Elidibus had announced the forthcoming assembly for the Summoning of Zodiark, and with it—loss of an immeasurable scale. The discussions had been dragging on for months, placid debates quickly toiling into bitter shouting matches. Lahabrea vexed you to no end. And you had been resolved from the advent, stubborn and adamant that it was a grave delusion. 

He had followed you all the way back to your rooftop flat that night, shuffling in tow inside the elevator shaft. Those last few weeks, you distanced yourself from him. You had moved back to your place and only suffered the smallest amount of contact. It had eaten away at him, ferociously.

_“Hades, it is a mistake and you know it. We know nothing of what will come with this. What if it is all for naught?”_

_Dropping your shoulders back against the wall with languor, you accidentally bump the back of your skull at its hard surface. A hiss presses from your teeth as your head becomes jarred from the impact, bringing a hand to rub wearily its soreness and pulling at your mask’s tie in the process._

_Hades instinctively moves to your side, fingers softly gripping at the back of your hood as the doors to the elevator hum to close. With a frown, you try to pull away but he already has your hood down. He examines the damage with a sigh and a sad little smile when he takes note that you are fine. Hands drifting to pull at your mask, he frees its closure and does the same with his own. Gold burns into your eyes as you attempt to turn away, the familiar sting of tears rushing forth._

_"What would you have us do? I do not want this any more than you! You must know that..." Hades whispers, the warmth of his fingers gently cradling along your jaw. His eyes pull over your face, seemingly trying to take in every feature as if he is afraid he would soon not see it again._

_You breathe out heavily, shaking your chin as you feel a damnable tear flow hot down your skin until Hades’s thumb swipes it away. For how he leans over your frame, his silken white hair drapes over the periphery. All you can see is him, your lover… your Hades._

_"This is unspeakable...I cannot do it. There must be another way. If we_ — _"_

_"If we only had more time, which we do not! We have to act now, or we stand to lose_ everything _." A wrinkle has set between his brow as he says this, a deep worry etched there and seething._

_“Please, I cannot do this without you.”_

_Before you can react, his lips ghost over yours just as the elevator softly thuds to a stop. The heat of his breath falls and fans softly over your lips. Something inside of you lurches, skin prickling and heart racing away. It has been weeks since you had allowed him to be so near, shutting him out to make the break easy and clean. But of course, it would not be so. How could it? You can smell sweet lavender in his hair, which reminds you of happier times. Its scent is soft and relaxing, from a concoction you had created for him in the past._

_The elevator doors whir open. Cool air floods the space, curling sharp around your ankles from beneath the robes and sparking your cognizance. Hades steals the words from your mouth before you can protest, lips capturing yours into a heady, desperate kiss. Your hands fist into the fine material at his broad shoulders, pushing feebly until the force melts into a needy tug as his tongue traces over the inside of your bottom lip. As the kiss deepens so rapidly and intensely, the hands at your face run smooth and possessive over your body_ — _pressing against the swell of your breasts and down along the ribs to then hook around to the back of your thighs. A low groan rumbles from your lungs when Hades hoists you aloft with such ease and carries you to the door to your flat, lips never breaking for air for all the fervency. It is a good thing that the floor is yours alone._

_A flick of your wrist and the door practically tears itself open with a rush of wind. The door promptly slams shut from behind as Hades finds his way to a plush lounge in the parlor. Once there, he lays you down and crawls over your body, straddling your hips as he breaks from your mouth to begin grating teeth roughly down the delicate skin of your neck. Your flesh is on fire, Hades slipping his fingers under the seam of the now sweltering robes to palm at your heaving breasts. His tongue trails down your throat, soothing over the ruts left behind from his ministrations._

_Rattling fingers rake through his radiant, frost-white tresses while his descent ensues on past your collarbone and down the valley of your peaks, his hands deftly peeling away at the unwanted clothing. One solitary click of the tongue slips from his mouth at the sight of your bra, hovering a finger just before swiping it at the air with a little flourish. The fabric singes and splits open, freeing your aching breasts to the warmth of his hands. The sexiest, sly grin curls at his lips as his golden eyes meet yours._

_“Hades! That was my favorite bra!”_

_The cry sounds almost too comical, given the circumstances of what had brought you two to this point in time. But just ere you allow yourself to sober with the thought, Hades laves his tongue over a pebbled nipple whilst pinching at the other. And you are lost in him, twisting a leg over his body as he sucks and strokes over your searing skin._

_Down his tongue travels, dancing over your navel to the hem of your skirt. To this article of clothing, he decides to leave intact—bunching up the material in haste as you hike up your weight at the elbow. Hades kneels on the floor before your panting form resting wanton upon the lounge. He gazes up at you with an unadulterated gaze of longing, vermilion lips already swollen and eyes glazed over dark. It makes your thighs quiver and causes a red-hot awareness to blush over your body. The panties, he decides to shred these with his bare hands—taking a forefinger to the middle at either side of your hips and wrenching the flimsy material away._

_A finger presses and curls into your heat, inciting your hips to buck up and quake from the touch. He then slowly and achingly pulls it away to bring to his lips, tasting and savoring your need for him. And then his mouth is on you, your hands buried in his long hair as he slakes his thirst on your hypersensitive flesh. You choke out broken gasps as he chases your pleasure, pressing his tongue through your folds and flicking, fluttering wet heat over your sex._

_Hades watches you so swiftly tumble down all around him, a trembling mess under his mouth as his hands grasp and massage along your thighs, now straddled over his shoulders. “Relax for me, my love,” he hushes out over your dewy petals as you feel you are already nigh at the precipice. “Let me take care of you…”_

_To his words, you fall apart as the rush of heat and euphoria flows over from under his touch, sweeping up any idea of the destruction taking place outside of the room. And he does not stop, sliding his tongue more gentle at first before rolling hot over your slick with broad strokes until you are breathless again and nearly spent from bliss._

_“So sweet, so good for me… I’ve missed you so very much...”_

_His breath lays hot on your flushed skin, locking his eyes to yours while he lazily kisses and nips at your thigh. He then rises to stand before you, shrugging off his robes and the rest of his clothing. The tiniest notion of hesitation billows at the pit of your stomach as Hades scoops you into his arms, though that melts to adrenaline under his lips as he begins kissing you softly, carrying you to the bedroom to lay you down on the large bed. His mouth never parts from yours as he holds you close, so close as if you would vanish from thin air. You lie on your back with him at your side, his length pressed and sliding against your soaking folds while the kisses become more insistent, more burning._

_Hades cannot stifle the hitch in his throat as you work your hips into him, then moving a hand to stroke over his shaft._

_“Ahh, yes. That’s it, like that.”_

_His moans leave you soaking even more, tugging his lip with your teeth. It has been so long, too long._

_“That’s my girl. Now, ride me.”_

_You push his shoulders down into the mattress, pinning him down as you slink over him as quickly as you can manage. Wasting no time, you bear down harsh upon him—feeling the sweet stretch from his girth pressing inside of you, deep and devastating to your senses. Your shoulders roll back while you slake your desire from his body, his hands raking over your stomach and to your breasts. A growl resonates from Hades’s breath as you rut your hips against him particularly slow and teasing, his fingers moving to splay at your back to push you down against him. You gasp when his teeth ensnare a nipple before suckling and swirling his tongue over your prickled flesh._

_Nimble and reigning are his movements to flip you quickly beneath him, pulling your wrists above your head to pin you down. You try to fight it, writhing under him and only presenting a finer angle for his throbbing sex to meet yours._

_“Ah, that’s it. You like that, don’t you?” The rasped whisper runs hot over your skin before he snaps a finger, white hair drifting soft over your face and neck. Aether coils and twines around your arms, binding you as he swallows your moans with his lips._

_Hades breaks from your mouth after a long moment to bend your legs back and stroke his length into you thorough, merciless and painstakingly slow. You twist and pull at the restraints, knees spread and braced over his shoulders while he unhurriedly brings you to completion. No matter, as it does not take long. You feel the heat washing and furling while he tilts you just so, rubbing so sweetly over those nerves bundled along your front walls._

_The cry falls broken and shuddering, the frenzied waves of heat roiling through your flesh. And then he seals it with another kiss, his own release crushing and buried deep as he unravels on top of you. His groans are smothered against your mouth and, as you feel the aether loosen its hold, your body wraps itself around him. There are tears in your eyes and you soon realise they are not all your own._

_“I love you.” Though the words from your tongue sound so small and dull next to the feeling that claws at your soul._

_In the aftermath, you lay along the mussed sheets, curled in Hades’s arms and you wish it to never end. Shortened breath becomes long and drawn, then lulling into sound darkness._

_When he wakes, you are not there._

That was the last time Hades would see you before the Summoning.

The next to the last time he would see you before your soul was scattered amongst the stars.

After that stolen moment of warmth, he would always watch for you, amber eyes aglow and trained on doors, windows, hallways, alleyways, parks. Like a madman, at least from the words of Hythlodaeus. 

A close mutual friend, Hythlodaeus was torn between the two of you. He, of course, had been against the Summoning and all that it wrought. So removed from the tension of the Convocation, he was able to view it with a clean lens and a calm mind. There seemed to exist no alternatives, but the dues were far too great to pay. 

_“For all of those lives, how will it rest on your conscience?”_

_Hades pressed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, a terrible migraine bleeding at the brain. “I tell you as I told her, there is no more time.”_

_Hythlodaeus bellowed out a laugh, more sardonic than mirthful, slapping firmly at the table between them. “And so you will hastily slaughter countless numbers of lives for what? A chance that this unknown power will somehow be the tutelar deliverer for our sinking world, with naught but the bloodstain of our people as the price? Perish the thought that it would be sated with only such!”_

_The other man could only close his eyes and slump down further in his chair. “Then render me an alternative, for I have nothing.”_

Just before the day of the Summoning, Hades had become utterly unhinged by the idea of any harm coming to you, hysterically begging Hythlodaeus to tell him where his former lover was. Yet his friend only offered a sad smile and promised that he would see that you were safe, knowing that things would only worsen if he were to make light of your decision to stay hidden. 

And hidden you remained after all that was brought to pass with the two harvests. Not until the hushed murmurs of a third sacrifice did your name suddenly emerge, and it had been clear that you were not truly hiding but making ready a great rival to purge the darkness. For whatever reason, the thought of it stirred extreme disquiet with Hades.

By that time, Hythlodaeus had disappeared as well, leaving him to only wonder if his close friend had fallen to slaughter as so many others had. The Bureau of the Architect lay abandoned and the only traffic it witnessed was his own heavy footfall, to-and-fro his old office—like some hapless ghost. A body never surfaced so it had not been difficult to deduce that the smug, cackling bastard must have joined ranks with you. 

Now Hades sat alone and smothered with endless questions.

_Where are you?_

_Are you safe?_

_What did you eat last night?_

_Are you sleeping well?_

_Are you happy?_

**_Do you miss me?_ **

...such a puerile, weak-minded question.

Hades slowly stood from the chair, muscles and bones creaking as an old man’s. 

Something had settled from within that whispered he had waited far too long.

He would face you, whether or not it meant that he would meet his end in you. 

Or your end in him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had much fun writing this one. Please let me know what you guys think of it!  
> ミ●﹏☉ミ


	4. prophylaxis

The white is as ceaseless as it is adamantine, with its absence of sound giving way to the ear-splitting trill of chimes. The emptiness—its hollow reaches out its grip to your soul and pierces through the fray. 

And a notion crests through the grey in your mind, numbing and brief as it is. The notion as to whether this all is the state of suspension in your being until you spiral and evolve into that of a monster. 

Much like Tesleen.

As terrifying as that line of thinking is, it is blotted out as swift as it arrives. 

Erased as if it had never been…

The keening chimes echo without relent for an unknowable stretch of time, until it is all you know—that _noise_ and the infinite white, all other senses having waned to naught. It soon gently swathes itself around, swaddling over and bestowing the oddest sort of calm. 

Stormless and familiar. 

A tiny, honeyed voice then whispers into your ear.

_You could stay like this._

And you consider a small, shameful, and dark thought.

**...**

For when was the last time you had felt this peace?

**...**

_Have I_ **_ever_ ** _truly felt peace?_

**...**

All you have known is the battlefield, bloodshed, and sacrifice—words which synonymize with pain, of the body and of the mind. Infallibly devoting your life force to others, with little consideration of your own needs and desires. A blade to wield down upon the wrongs in this existence, and no fire left over in your veins to breathe for anything other than the cry of war. 

Leave the others, grand orators like Alphinaud or Urianger, to tarry with piddling words until the fated and final blow you would be commanded to strike. 

Such is the life you have lived. No family, save the one you had found with the Scions those few short years ago. Friends you have gained along the way, only to lose through distance or death. And let no one speak of a lover. A quick romp between the sheets with a stranger or two did not count much for that.

It was an empty, fleeting, and _back-breaking_ existence—that life, glut with butchery and retribution.

The only truth you have ever had was in Hydaelyn, the source of this struggle.

And where is She now? 

So, _yes_. Mayhap you could stay like this, if only for the slightest modicum of respite.

The white washes over you, its sickening talons squeezing and wresting deep into the weave of your soul. With every divine twist, you set yourself alight and free to oblivion. 

And the chimes sing so sweetly, much like a soft lullaby.

That is, until something warps at their lilting call. So very subtle at first, the sound bends and shells out into more of a death knell. A tether, akin to a coiling stitch, is tugged from the center of your being. And then forcefully, it is uprooted as a sapling from the festering ground.

Innervation slowly seeps into your corporeal form and the strain of it is far too much to bear. 

It feels as though you are being peeled from the inside out, the flesh flayed from bone like the rind severed from a fruit—the pith of your aether and soul left raw and seething to the open-air. And you cannot see a thing. So it becomes horrifyingly unclear as to where the sensation is derived from. 

The pain succumbs over to paralysis while it courses through every channel and crevice with which it may pass—from corpuscule to organ, beset in trauma. Surreal and unequalled to that of any travail you have withstood thus far, the memories bound to the ugliest of scars on your skin are laughable against its calibre.

Something heavy settles in your mouth and sinks down your throat, suffocating your lungs. Your eyes smoulder like glowing embers as even the ability to choke for air has been stripped aside. 

It is your tongue, you realise this with alarming clarity when the dull synapses in your brain begin to finally pulse. For one long, disturbing moment, the touch of death curls around your aether until something wet and cool splashes over your lips. The heaviness lifts and a pressure gathers at your spine, before tingling surges into the airways and you can breathe again.

Your form lurches forward as you gasp out with such urgency, the strangled sounds slipping from your throat resonating into more of a banshee than anything else. Then a blindsiding warmth sheathes from all over, an embrace that acts to still those feral cries. All you see is vivid white and yet there is now a muffled, soothing hum at your ear. The warmth presses you back down in your addled state, heaving ribs sore from the effort of just _living_. 

A shroud embedded with thousands of stinging needles is laid upon your body, prickling and stunning at the lingering vestige of deadened senses that still cling desperate. The viscera and muscles beneath your flesh are convulsing, tying into maddening knots as your organs are brought back to life.

You can feel your body thrashing and writhing against what now feels like a cage or lattice of aether that binds it down. To what? A table of sorts, or a bed? From somewhere deep within, another garbled and broken cry bursts free.

But then the warmth returns, this time caressing over the crown of your head. With a dreamy echo, heat flushes over the shell of your ear. Something soft presses at the curve of your jaw and then to the temple. And a tender hold surrounds your hand, all at once reassuring and profound. 

_“Stay with me, love. Breathe for me.”_

That voiced plea creates a chasm through which all the agony your body is thrust against. Hot tears are pooling and burning furiously at the skin, and your fingernails claw tight to the grip on your hand. 

The excruciating feeling gradually bleeds away, trailing behind a searing fire in its wake. It is immediately recognized for what it is: the Light you have suffered for weeks dragging on into months now. And there is a new contour and facet of affliction that is reaped from its marrow, all sense of perception scoured to ruin.

Your very soul is ablaze and smothered by its flame for a stunted moment, until darkness falls over mellow and pure. 

.

..

...

_A string of chanting resounds and folds over the quiet air._

_The heavens shine radiant, nigh blinding with glow over the nascent land. Newborn trees, lush vegetation and flowers carpet along the once-scorched horizon. The simple, virginal beauty of the budding biome provides a fitting stage for the invocation of a new savior. One to bequeath a balance for the blackened star._

_There are many of you, many more than the number who had summoned Zodiark._

_High and low, you had swept the star for the pillar to forge and breathe life into a mirror to bend back His shadow. And finally, it is coming to fruition. You would feel relief coursing straight through your soul if it were not for all of the blood that had been spilled to get to this moment._

_Instead, it is a most numbing experience. Your hands are linked and bound, a chain of crackling synergy surging through your aether—the power of it is unparalleled. You stand at the center from which all others spiral forth, in the middle of a clearing within the forest. It would appear quite bizarre from above, both alien and fantastic._

_The chanting lulls and bridges into a buzzing hum as time flows on. Sweat on your brow, one of your hands is clutched painfully by your friend while the other hand is cast aloft into the yawning sky._

_That sky, it is quite mesmerising really. Coral and cerise blushes over alabaster and glittering gold. Whorls of cerulean spin from your fingertips as the hum grows deafening, your eyelids hitched open wide to the raw power spindling and catalysing into a great zephyr of essence._

_The essence of Her, channeling from you._

_And the grasp at your skin clutches deep, though it is not the burgeoning ache that breaks your gaze from the task._

_It is the tremble._

_When you drop your focus and let it fall on your friend, the heavy azure of his eyes makes you falter—bright with tears as he stares back at you with a small smile. The smallest of smiles that says everything all at once. It sucks the air out of your lungs, lips hanging open as the finality of what is to come settles and takes root._

_“Hyth… I don’t.. I don’t know if—”_

_One would think the words stammering from your mouth would have been swallowed by the din twisting over the silence of the woods. But your friend squeezes tight to your hand, wild eyebrows furrowed with an offbeat charm. Everyone else is shut behind closed eyes and prayer, deaf to the persiflage._

_“Come now, do not tell me you are having performance anxiety!”_

_An unsteady gasp of laughter shudders from your breath as Hythlodaeus squeezes your hand yet again and nods his chin. A look of unspoken understanding and solidarity crosses over his countenance._

_There are no masks here._

_“You can do this.”_

_Briefly, your eyes move skyward to the churning tempest of blue._

_You have come this far…_

  
  


For those we have lost. For those we can yet save…

...

..

.

Screams. All that is heard are your screams as your mind rips from one nightmare into another, the threads binding your soul worn thin and unravelling. 

Warmth draws to your forehead, which you now understand as the skin of another’s palm. And then a whisper of a voice you at once _know_ is hushed along your cheek.

“You are going to be well again. You will get through this. Just hold my hand and breathe, love.”

To that voice, an unsettling form of melancholia reels through your being. You choke out a sob, just barely blind to its source as you reach out to it all the same. You are crushing at the hand against your grip, surely splintering at the bones beneath.

The white over your vision has dimmed and is furled by waves of shadow. It twines and chills through the flesh on down to the soul, slowly rendering you insensate to the pain from the Light. 

“I…Wh…” 

_Why can’t I see?_

It is frightfully difficult to speak, fingers catching on something lush and fine to touch. You pull close to it, the only comfort you yet have in your grasp.

And then you feel that prior warmth fold around your shoulders, which you now recognize as arms wrapping you into an embrace. And to your brow, lips pressing and quelling the maelstrom of fear.

It feels as though the Light is siphoning elsewhere, leeching away.

Darkness falls yet again.

.

..

...

_You do not know how it happened, for once you opened your eyes to it—it had already been too late._

_Amidst the broken, fledgling wood, the bodies of your comrades lie._

_The sight stretches beyond your purview, their forms mangled and scattered afar._

_At the heart of it all, you still yet stand._

_The silence of it, the totality and veracity of it…_

_Hythlodaeus lays just before your feet._

_The skies are a blinding whirlwind of white and lapis as you await your end._

_Except you hear your name, from a voice you are no stranger to._

_Your gaze hooks on wintry white silk and those eyes, brimming and red with hurt to match your own. He carefully steps around the fallen to meet you._

_“No, you cannot be here!”_

_The intonation from your lips is both cruel and vehement, a shadow of absolute dread there and sinking in its poisoned teeth._

_He only shakes his head, crazed as he strides towards you with a purpose in his step._

_“_ Please. _It’s not safe! You_ need _to leave.”_

_Still, he walks until he reaches you, colliding into your form and engulfing you in the heat of his arms to pull you close._

_It is as an ancient memory, a fast withering thought drifting in from the darkest recesses of your mind. A fluke in the design of the powers that be. A glimpse of kismet, playing out before your eyes._

_"Do not do this._ Let me save you."

_A punch to the gut, it is a true wonder that you have yet the strength to drag out a response._

_"What else is there for me? It is too late."_

_The words are bereft of life, as if drawn from the breath of one already turned to dust. Limitless power quakes and surges within the bounds of your soul, one step from shattering._

_He pulls gently away enough to rest his forehead against yours and you can feel the tremor of his weeping, the wet from his tears along your skin. The gold of his eyes leaden._

_Your hands sweep upward to his face, over to cradle the exquisite carve of bone and swipe away what pain you can. Though you do not possess the same sight as he, the hue of his soul is as the loveliest of dreams. You hope that the afterlife will grant you with at least this one shred of remembrance._

_"But know this. I have always loved you, Hades. And it will not end with my passing."_

_His brow stitches itself tight and he closes his eyes within your hold before setting their brilliance into you. Stern and unbending._

_"This is_ not _the end. I will trail the stars until they lead me back to you."_

_What little trace of breath left in your chest forsakes you, shaking with indescribable emotion._

_One last kiss, quivering and wrought with desperation. Slow and numb at first, it blossoms uncontrollably as his fingers wind through your hair. All the coalesced feeling, snapped shut and overflowing with such a mere touch between two cursed souls._

_It is not enough._

_When you break away to a safe distance, your eyes close for one final time. And you shoot into the sky as if a newborn star. The essence of your soul, split asunder and acting as the stimulus for the end._

_The end of an age too paradisiacal to have lasted ever after._

...

..

.

You awake whilst in his arms, as if breezing into yet another dream. Fingertips graze delicate and careful over your shoulder.

Something feels different, more grounded and beautiful.

Your mouth is pressed into his neck, the heavy regalia traded in for a simple and fine black vesture. With nary a thought, it slips from your tongue as you snuggle and breathe in his scent.

"Hades…"

All at once, the touch upon your skin stills itself just as the body you are wound about like a ribbon.

_"What did you just say?"_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry (but not sorry) for all of the angst. Fluff will come with next chapter. :D  
> I hope you all have a Happy Holidays and thanks to everyone for reading!


	5. unstrung

“Hades…”

It would have been impossible for you to have known that a name could carry such weight. For what is it other than a mere label affixed to an acquaintance? Commonplace and uncomplicated. 

One would not think to dwell, as it is something that can be so easily taken at face value. No more, no less. Like waving to a friend you have not seen for a long time, when you should have hugged them close. Or making someone smile with a silly joke when your mind is elsewhere.

Though give it time with space to breathe, and it will fester. 

Surely, some time had passed since you teased the Ascian for not revealing his true name to you. Jesting on with a lighter heart, short-sighted as to how the cards could turn so sharply and be snagged cold from your grasp. It is mortifying how clueless you have been thus far. How clueless you _still_ are, about so many other things.

With lips pressed to the crook of his neck, just over the velvet skin along the jugular, you feel his form grow taut beneath your touch. You had only just awoken, that name dredged up from some place dark and heavily bound, chained and rusted with age. And the racing within your ribcage is making your breath grow short, ragged. Just as his.

“What did you just say?”

His voice is a broken thing, raw and uncharacteristic to the smooth and rich timbre you are accustomed to. You only then notice that your eyes are closed. A fear trickles over that when you open them, white will cloud over yet again. 

Slowly, as your muscles tense around the man from underneath, your eyelids fall open and everything is hazed at first. As your pupils focus under the faint glow of the space you find yourself in, you pull away and—without much thought but with much vigour—rise to straddle Emet-Selch at the waist. In doing so, it is not difficult to catch on that your body is teeming with energy, washed pristine of the prior horrors it had faced. The Light seems to have vanished and the feeling is thrilling, liberating.

Belatedly, you come to the realisation that you both are on _your_ bed, within the inn room at the Pendants. That same plain yet premium bedding is what gives it away, along with the ruddy, mortared brick in the foreground. The sun is setting as the stars are waking. Whatever else is lost to the visage beneath you, with hands fisted into the sheets at your sides. You cannot even think for words to say.

A mock turtleneck, fitted and raven black with kecks to match. And a simple robe, splayed out open, pooled along his prone and lithe form. Perhaps by instinct, his large hands meet the swell of your hips and it takes all of your self-restraint to not sigh out softly at the contact. 

He looks up at you with such fixation, golden gaze stunned motionless—set off by parted lips the selfsame colour of a fine bordeaux. His burgundy locks sweep and fall behind along the pillow, with some stray strands of white still drifted over the blaze of an eye. 

For grounds you cannot fathom, the more you focus, there is a sheen of blood-orange stain winding about him—as if embedded and married with his very aether. Something that you have yet to see before, and should not be able to see. Stranger still is the diffuse glow along its penumbra, against the shadows. It is but a nuance, though it is there just the same and familiar all at once.

And the silence between the two of you should now be bordering on uncomfortable, yet that is not the case.

Again, with little thought, your hands find themselves buried into his silken hair. Leaning over in such a manner, the ripple of his abdominal muscles undulates in stuttering waves from between your thighs. The faint brush against that part of you, it hitches the breath and sends a frisson of heat down your navel. 

“You heard me.”

Those few words break from your tongue as a challenge. Naturally, it is something you have not fully thought through. Your paths in this existence are misaligned and destined to tumble down to ruin, should the choice be made to indulge. 

Yet those few glimpses of a dying world unknown have your body lit as a match to a bonfire. Your past is bound to his, another life from a time stretched far beyond your comprehension. And there is this matter of unspoken deliverance, that he—the Ascian and Paragon Emet-Selch—is now your savior. Whether he spake the truth of following your soul through the eons to find some other path, it is all lost to you.

Something is just at the surface, brimming and bubbling forth—begging to be set free. You can feel it all over and throughout your aether, kinetic to the point of a frenzy.

One of his hands releases from your hip while the other holds fast, gripping into the bone. With an unhurried pace, his long fingers travel the length of your torso, over the dip of ribs and just past the breast. Then, up the bend of the shoulder they cross to curl and tangle into your hair. You only notice then, as his bare touch grazes along and drags so slow as to catch, that you don only the slinkiest and most thin of robes. Its lovely fabric is feeble and well-nigh diaphanous, even under the dimming light of day. 

“ _Say it again_.” The command comes out as a rasp, prickling over your spine and plucking down deep beyond flesh and bone.

You readily comply.

“Hades.”

It is the most marginal amount of force that brings you flush to him, body freely falling in such a way that there is no space between your heaving chest and his own. His brow becomes knitted as his eyes search over your face, finespun threads of pale gold dancing in the eventide. “What are you doing to me, hero?” he whispers against your breath.

The response slips from your mouth without an onze of effort. “Oh, but you called me ‘love’ before, did you not?”

His eyes burn into you as a fire, not unlike that time along the seaside.

The fingers at your hip claw deep, more sharpness there than what would be considered normal. And the hand twined ‘round your locks pulls _just_ enough, not too severe nor too tame. He brings his lips a hairsbreadth away from yours as he twists you under him, firmly pinning his hips over your legs and straddling you in turn. Some small piece of you wishes to fight against him, but it is abortive before the instinct wills it to fruition.

Instead you kiss him, even as his hands find their way about your wrists to restrain you in a needless fashion. It is made plain that you have stunned him, while your teeth tug at his bottom lip perhaps a mark too heatedly, and he seems nonplussed by your urgency. That is but for a mere whit of a moment, until the Ascian groans into your kiss and _bites_ back in quite the literal sense. 

There is a light fluttering and tightness beneath your sternum as he presses teeth to your lip, then running his tongue over until you welcome it and your moans are crying for it. You feel his grip falter at your wrists before sliding one hand back into your hair, and another snaking down past your jaw to your throat. His lips drag from your mouth before he brings them to your ear.

“You can understand that this is a mistake, and yet you continue to torment me. Whatever am I to do with you?”

The whisper seethes hot into your skin and his tongue trails down the earlobe before nipping harsh, pressing a hiss from your teeth while his fingers splay down your neck and edge down south past the jut of collarbone. By sheer need, your hips rut upward and sinfully against him for friction. His fingers laced through your tresses tighten and hook at the contact.

“Mmm, well perhaps you should have thought better before you decided to save me.” You say this as his gold eyes pull back over to yours into a stretching gaze. 

Your hands card over the silkiness of his scalp, fingertips settling into the shortened dark hair at the nape of his neck. A soft waft of deep red swirls over, that same glimmer at its margins. You want to ask but the words die on your tongue.

Emet-Selch licks his lips slow, then presses them to yours in a kiss more soft than the others. It leaves you more breathless than ever, the sinuous touch of his mouth skimming along as a feather. He pulls away after a long moment to work his way down your neck, sucking and worrying teeth over to leave the most precarious bruises.

“Hades…” 

Your whimpers and calls only grow more loud as his mouth and tongue press over your flushed skin down further, his hands parting away the skimpy material of the robe. It is so hot, too undeniably and unforgivingly hot when the fall of his warm breath ghosts over a nipple and the heat of his fingers grasp smooth over the flesh. His teeth snare over its tenderness which draws a choking gasp from your lungs, and you have to clasp a hand over your mouth while a finger simultaneously drifts down between your thighs to stroke over the slick there. It takes you off-guard, legs inadvertently squeezing together around his touch and body curling upward into him. 

“Ah, are we sensitive?” he asks, smiling devilishly into your breast and flicking his tongue against its rosey bud.

Before you can bite back a reply, and as you rest back against the sheets, you take note of the concern that flashes over his eyes while he looks upon you. Or moreso, _through_ you. That concern quickly seeps into a sweep of outright anxiety, his hands coming to grasp along your waist. 

You open your mouth to ask what is wrong, but then the answer arrives unbidden with a spike of broiling pain that ignites from deep within—surging out like levin and thrumming forth a shriek. The hands at your waist draw tight, Emet-Selch pulling over your body and pressing his forehead to yours. 

Relief begins flooding over almost immediately. Your fingers dig into the fine sable weave of his open robes, reaching for purchase underneath to bear yourself against him more closely. As if to hasten whatever sweet balm of magicks he is salving over you. Alas, all that can be done is to focus on that sea of gold while the throes ebb away to naught. It is the most uncanny feeling, something wretched bled dry from the whole of your being. 

“Steady… It’s all right. Breathe with me, love.”

And that is what you do, until it comes to pass. The damned tears are streaming ere long, though his lips catch what they can. 

“‘Tis a process. A great deal of the Light has been siphoned from you thus far. There is yet a lingering vestige that may take time, though you are no longer in danger.” 

His voice is quiet as he settles to lay by your side, moving to close your robe and rub his hand wearily, with care along your stomach. You cannot help but notice how ashen he looks, the usual dark under his eyes somehow even more pronounced. Though a smile curls at one corner of his mouth.

“I am afraid you are not yet ready for such a… kindling of your faculties.” 

Unsteady and trembling, your hand reaches to clutch at his. “You are harming yourself…”

Your searching eyes lock him into a gaze, one he holds even as a mask slips over his countenance. "No worse for wear, my dear." 

Before you can think to retort, an insistent rattle of a knock sounds at the inn room door. It is as if all the air is sucked from the space and reality comes crashing down with full force when you hear Alisaie’s voice, calling your name. Your body lurches forward with the disturbance.

“Is that you? _Gods_ , we have been worried sick! May I come in?”

A wisp of shadowed aether twirls at the periphery and Emet-Selch chases away, no goodbyes offered other than a lone kiss pressed to your knuckle. You curse the butterflies that manifest from the simple gesture.

“Really?!” you mutter under your breath, drawing up a knee and combing fingers through your hair with something beyond mere frustration. 

More incessant knocking.

“Come in!” 

It feels like getting back home from a holiday, albeit a rather taxing one. 

Alisaie bustles into the room and finds you on the bed, the sheets coiled and strung around your form with a frown stitched on your face. 

“Well, look at you! _Finally_ awake, at long last.” She rushes forward to give you a hug that you do not have the energy to return. “Oh, and what was that I heard just a moment ago? It sounded like you were talking to someone.”

The small Elezen has just pulled away from you and, this close, there is a real fear brewing that she will be able to see right through the bullshite.

“No, nothing. Your knocking woke me up. Mayhap I was talking in my sleep?”

You mentally kick yourself for that weak, harebrained response. 

Alisaie tilts her chin to your words, crossing her arms with a ruminative look upon her tiny and fair features. “I could have sworn I heard someone else…”

“Ah, ah. One should never swear, little one.” She _hates_ your pet name for her, especially since you do not use any such thing with Alphinaud.

The girl scoffs at you, turning to go sit at the table. As she makes her way, a hand swipes an apple from the bowl of fruit. “You had us all in a fit of nerves, you realise. We could not find a trace of you after we arrived at Tomra. You made that excuse about needing fresh air or _something_ and off you went. Where _were_ you?”

A half-hearted shrug is all you can manage for a reply, your mind reeling at this point. Everything that had happened thus far, since then—cresting to the forefront of your thoughts. Your fingers are presently wrenching into the sheets, distractedly.

Rather than eat the fruit, Alisaie proceeds to pitch it from one hand to the other as she carefully looks at you. “We found you here, passed out in some sort of a comatose state. The Exarch is beside himself, everyone is really. Urianger was in utter shambles, trying to make sense of it. We had wondered if you hit your head but naught was amiss, no bumps or scrapes. It has been several nights of this.”

It suddenly feels as if you are in a sweltering sauna, a fine sheen of sweat beading upon the skin of your brow and upper lip. Your breathing is constricted tight within your chest, a quickened throb fast becoming painful.

“I will have to let all the others know you have awoken.” Alisaie springs out of the chair and steps to the door. She halts her movement halfway there. “Ah, though I _do_ have the most splendid news to tell you!”

Perhaps this is all in your head, for she seems to not take notice of your visage crumbling before her.

“The night sky has returned to Kholusia!”

Everything stops in that breadth of time in space. Solid still, as stone. 

You think of all the questions you did not ask.

(how you did not even _think_ to ask.) 

All those questions that _you **should** have asked_. 

Your empty stare sails to your friend, heart lodged in your throat. “ _What?_ ”

Alisaie smiles wide, before it falters by just a fraction as she reaches for the door handle.

“Vauthry is dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted this a little earlier than I thought I would. I was going to add more smut, but it did not feel right just yet. Sorry about that, truly. It will come. Tempted to tag this as slow burn but I think we've passed that point already. ;D  
> 


	6. gnaw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: Please take note of the new tags, substance abuse in particular. In no way do I condone such coping mechanisms. If you are experiencing symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please talk to someone and get help from a medical professional. Do not try to do it all on your own. ;)

In silence you walk amongst the many who wander the stone-laden paths, creeping and sprawled out before the lucent vista of the Syrcus Tower. The iron and bronze-spired haven is buzzing with a certain verve, perhaps moreso than when night first touched this particular part of Norvrandt after a lifetime of anaemic white sky. 

Moisture gathers at the nape of your neck and clings between your shoulder blades, trickling like mad down your back. You do not remember it being so terribly hot here before you had left for Kholusia to first seek out Vauthry. The climate around Lakeland has always ever been temperate, quite agreeable really. Absentmindedly, your chin tilts to the pretty skies and an errant breeze catches a lock of hair at your temple, unfurling it out of your hood. 

And it hits you hard, as the wind brushes soft along your skin. Because... no, it is not hot here.

That is just all in your head. 

Your eyes fall to look onward and then the realisation dawns that you are standing motionless, figures streaming past, their eyes shifting to stare and speculate. With a tremulous exhale, you tuck your chin down and begin walking again, pulse thumping profusely to the point it clenches the skull. 

_one...two..._

Had you the concentration to teleport to the aetheryte at the Pendants directly, you would have done so. Sheer paranoia has driven you to take an alternate path from the Rotunda to your inn room, avoiding any movement closer to the Dossal Gate than what is necessary. Rather than amble down the main thoroughfare of the markets, you try your best to remain unnoticed and forgotten by the denizens—a pointless venture given the obvious, though still you clutch the hooded cloak more tightly at the collar. And the heat is nigh intolerable now.

You lack the focus for even stale palaver, let alone any discussions with your comrades about the recent state of unrest in the First. Thus do you continue on with eyes trained on toes and a shuffle more akin to a wretch than a warrior. None of the flourish and stride of any vaunted champion of Hydaelyn, by all means. Falling back to long buried techniques to keep your calm, and suffocated by disturbing thoughts swimming through your mind.

_three...fou....._

_... for Her?_

_those people_ — _no, corpses. littering the ground as a ghoulish tapestry of flesh, teeth, hair..._

.. **my** _fault..._ **my** _doing..._

You stop your tracks again, feeling the pulse pass through to a fierce ache at your skull, closing in and _crushing_. There is a nook just past that catches your attention, under a set of sweeping stairs that leads to your room, your sanctuary at this point. With a quick glance around, there seem to be no eyes. Mindlessly, you lumber along until you reach a spot partially hidden behind a beam to then lean against. There, with fingers worming through your hair and pulling, you vehemently curse yourself for not being able to make it behind the safety of your door. 

_...four...five..._

It feels as though you are shackled within a crawling fog, whilst all those around you carry on with nary a thought as to how you are faring. Then again, that would be an unjust observation. For your penchant for reticence has gone full bloom, in fear of what may pass if you were to concede to the truth that your life is in a state of freefall. As it happens, it seems that still no one knows anything about where you were when you went missing in Kholusia. Perhaps your silence about the matter has been working at the moment, even if the nature of said silence likens to that of a bandage made much too small for a gaping wound. Hence, the reason you are collapsed under a set of godsdamned stairs.

It has been merely a handful of moons since everything, as you know it, has been turned on its head. And instead of facing the hardship with grit and detachment, figurative baubles which you have desperately clutched to in order to press through so many bloodied battles, all at once you have been dealt a blow that has left everything thrown off balance. 

Though you are the Warrior of Light from the Source, seven times rejoined as someone had once practically swooned to you, it does not make you some impenetrable force as many would so blindly believe. Just as you have been enlightened that even an Ascian can express sentiments and vulnerabilities—so too can you, the unshakable and mighty hero. For power does not grant supreme immunity to any weakness or flaw. It only shrouds the chink in one’s armor, like the warmest cloak, until you forget the source of it and _may_ even forget there was any fear or shame bred from it at all. 

_...six..._

_...seven..._

_A mighty hero... bathed in the blood of legions..._

_Not only in this life, but..._

Truly, you lack the understanding to know what you are anymore. Those haunting dreams, or whatever they were, have been branded to the forefront of your mind. Where exhilaration once teemed through to bone and aether from the advent, the grains of sand have sifted through the hourglass and have rendered chaos in their wake. What is more, an Ascian has saved you and _gods knows what happened to Vauthry_. 

You were told that a body was found lying crumpled beneath Mt. Gulg, at the heart of a great mass of sin eater corpses. Impossible to miss, some of the villagers of Amity had informed the Exarch with eyes wide in equal parts terror and elation. All of that, in the midst of everyone trying to find you throughout all odd corners of the First. 

By the time the bedlam had settled, no such body was ever recovered. Only a heap of foul flesh.

No one saw the creatures fall from the sky, but some more acquainted with the aetherial flow could feel the shift in the shard. Something clicking into place. Ryne said that she had nearly fell to her knees with it. And then darkness touched the taint of the skies, blacking out its sick gleam over Kholusia. 

But _you_ did not have anything to do with that.

_...e-eight..._

_...nine..._

Of every region within Norvrandt, it is well known that Kholusia had always been the most persecuted—bound by Vauthry’s perverse fantasy of a land subsumed by monstrosity. The disease had been borne and only spread its rot from there. And now that he is dead, tomorrow will bring something different. A fresh start with the peace of mind that _perhaps_ life will come a little easier, equality and rectitude in place of the attrition from subjugation and fear.

But no, you are not responsible for those cries of deliverance, weeping with joy and relief that _finally_ the night has returned to that land, and thus to all of Norvrandt...

Your back is pressed against the wall and your huddled form is at the ground now, robes veiling over for no one to see. 

Everything is spiralling, slipping from your grasp, twisting in your chest and down your stomach...

_...ten..._

_...eleven..._

_Vauthry is gone..._

_...Emet-Selch._

_did Hades...?_

**_but why?_ **

More questions lay before you than answers and never before have you been so intimately bound to those questions as you find yourself now. And it seems there is only one who can help you through it. Only one who you would trust to speak of the things floating through your headspace. Only one who you yearn for to hold you close and tell you that—no, you are not going mad, even as broken as he likely is himself.

**_Where is he?_ **

A nearby sound cuts into your fevered rumination, head lifting though your eyes are unseeing. With more effort than you would care to admit, you push yourself to stand so to make haste to your inn room. Your footsteps inadvertently pick up in speed when the entrance to the Pendants finally comes into view. 

You try to keep it cool, to breathe and walk steady even as your limbs scream to run with abandon. 

_...twelve...thirteen..._

...

_fourteen..._

_..._

**Fourteen.**

**...**

Something latches onto your forearm just after you stumble up shallow stairs, just as you pass through the towering threshold, just as you feel your aether is raging hot on fire and your mind is cracking and the tears are rushing forth. You sharply gasp from the touch and swing out your weapon, unthinking and utterly swallowed by hysteria. 

A hand firmly stays your wrist, however. The bronzed leather bindings, braided and looped around fair skin—this is the first thing you see, your fingers going weak and boneless when awareness seeps in. The hollow echo of your weapon clattering to the ashen brick resounds within the hall, and you can feel the piercing stare of the innkeeper from his desk as your drag your eyes upward to a half-shrouded face. Jagged contours and planes of cerulean crystal glimmer even under the dull reaches of light.

“E-Exarch…” 

Your voice is uncertain and hushed, as you know that he must see how much of a basket case you are. There is no way to hide it, even under the hulking shadows by the edifice of arched stone. 

The Exarch’s pale lips purse into a frown as he regards you from under his embellished hood, grip softening slightly along your flesh. Disquiet blooms in your gut when he does not let go. “We need to talk.”

With little tact, you attempt to pull from his hold on you, to which the man permits with a sigh. This is the one person, out of everyone, that you had wished to avoid. And now, you are much like a wild, cornered animal. 

“No, we do not.”

As the words pass from your dry lips with a vexing scratch in your throat, the notion dawns that this is likely not the best manner to respond. Though you cannot help yourself. And _he_ cannot help you either.

The Exarch wedges his burnished staff down into the grit of pavement. He braces his weight against it by just a margin, canting his chin down as if searching for the right thing to say. Then he shakes his head, huffing out another sigh, purely in evident frustration. Never had you seen his composure falter in such a manner, usually able to remain as stoic as you had once been. Suddenly, just as so many other times before, a wish burns to see the rest of his face, to see his eyes, to know their colour…

“I am worried about you.” 

And it is said so quietly that only you could hear, even as some individuals stride past. You both had not moved from the Pendants’ threshold, and a thought surfaces that this is not the place to have any such talks. Nor is your inn room, however. 

“There’s nothing to worry about,” you murmur softly, while treading over inside the lush tenement. 

Light pools and warms over your skin, spilling from the top of the structure. As streams of tepid air flow from the movement under your hood, you decide to set free from it and tousle your hair with your fingers to help cool off. The sound of his footfall from behind floods your ears as you make way around the decadent jet-black balustrade to its adjacent railing, then coiling your fingers against the chill of metal to help ground yourself. It takes little time for your eyes become trapped by the gentle sway and drift of the water below. 

The two of you simply stand there in silence for a while, however long it being lost on you. It could have been several minutes or up to a bell, for all your crippled mind could gather. Although, by the time anything is said, the tendons in your hand are bruised from squeezing and wrenching at rigid ore. 

You first hear him clear his throat, and then the rush of breath from his lips before he speaks. “Please take no offense to this, but you do look unwell. I would like to help.” The timbre of his voice is low, so low that the wind could carry it afar. 

This is not news, for any notion of repose has shrivelled away. The will to get out of bed had only occurred to you just yesterday, after a fit of cursing the stale air in your room and wanting to shout at the heavens from the open window. Since the last thing you need is to become admitted to an asylum on the First, you decided that getting out again would do you some good. Only now, you instead curse inwardly for that bad call as your eyes watch the shadows stretch along the sleepy rise and fall of azure. 

“I just need rest. I’ve not been sleeping well. Perhaps I will venture to the infirmary and see if they have a tincture to help.” A half-truth, though at least it is something. 

The Exarch has taken to gripping his free hand at the railing as well, and you note the thrumming pulse under his skin from the strain. He knows you are not saying everything. And why should you? He who remains beneath the cowl. Perhaps he knows some of what happened, spying from that glass in the Ocular. The thought is certainly not unwarranted. 

Or it could be more simple, for you are no longer a beacon of accursed Light. ‘Shtola and Ryne would see as much. It is only a matter of time before you would have to answer to it. 

There is another period of silence, and this time it feels far more uncomfortable than the last. It serves as a portent for the fated words you know that he will say.

Even under the cryptic shroud, it is not difficult to sense the near tangible anxiety brewing in the man’s body. The tension quivers in the manner with which he holds his staff and how he sets his jaw. As if he is one step from shaking the truth from you. As if you alone possess the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. 

“Do you…” he begins while turning towards you, and unwittingly your stance shifts ever so the same. “Do you remember anything at all about what happened? When you were gone? Where you were?” There is an edge to his words that you had not parsed before.

It is nigh impossible for you to not tick your jaw to the questions. How many times you had been asked, as if to catch you in your lie. By all of your friends—the Scions, by countless associates and locals that you had run into, by _him_ now. Before you had not seen it, though now it is palpable within his very aether: doubt. 

“No.” Your reply is impassive, as that throb returns. The now natural shine from the sky is effectively baking your brain and the desire to chase off to the refuge of your room has never felt so strong. "Pray tell, why is it you ask? You've heard me already say as much. I do not remember."

On the inside, you are screaming. As if the shame you had cleaved to from lying to him only once would have been enough to end the affliction there. For him, and for everyone besides. Though he, he had brought you to this world for you to be the hero, where there was no one else who could succeed _but_ you. He placed his confidence in you and truly, you had done the same with him when you began slaying the Lightwardens. 

And you...what is it that you are even doing right now?

The Exarch has nothing to say to your words, at least for the moment. You quickly decide to lurch at the opportunity. 

“I need to go.” The unease is fast becoming too much, the guilt of just being near him eating at your mind. You offer the man a smile, one you hope comes off genuine and unwavering. “Let us speak later, when I am feeling a bit better.” 

His reply comes as a hesitant nod and you turn away before he can say any more. 

Everything is a blur on the way back to your room, up the spiralling stairs and past the many doors seemingly without end before you finally reach your own. Your fingers fumble with the key, hands shaking and nearly dropping it before metal clicks in sync and the door handle gives. Breath held, you slip inside and press your back to the door while simultaneously locking it again. 

For a time, the room is void of sound. Beautiful and boundless silence with your eyes closed tight, attempting to breathe like everything is fine. As if you are not falling apart. 

Then, quietly you walk to your armoire to open the wide berth of its doors. Stooping down, your fingers run the length of maple wood from beneath stacks of neatly folded tunics and other sundry items of attire. The pad of your forefinger catches at a notch from which—with minimal amount of effort—a smallish compartment is opened. 

“There are better ways to handle your problems.” 

The voice is so familiar, a part of you now. 

Your fingers grasp onto the thick velvet pouch inside, and you pivot your form to sag back against the wardrobe. Then, without ceremony, you drop to sit upon the floor with legs splayed forward.

“Offering me advice now, are you?” you mutter, not bothering to look up as you work the little glass bottles from the pouch. 

As he walks across the space of the room, the thud of his heavy steps cannot be heard. Nor can the tired sorrow in his voice be felt, by anyone other than you. 

“I’ve been down this path before, Warrior of Light. Warrior of Darkness.” 

You shrug his words off. “It is merely medicine, Ardbert. Something to help calm me down. I cannot even hope to bear a weapon for how wound up I am right now.” 

Deftly and with purpose, your fingers pop the cork off of one of the bottles. The tincture within, saffron in colour, glows ever so like gold. Only to be taken in very small doses.

Ardbert watches as you down the bottle in one go, and then another. Three do the trick, as before. All he can do is watch.

"Why do you continue to lie?" he asks, while your vision clouds over into dreamy haze.

He is the voice in your head, picking and scratching at your soul.

"To protect him from himself." 

Not long after, you manage to crawl to your bed. The numbness is just beginning to settle into your bones, that gentle break from reality as your eyes drift to close. You do not know if your phantom friend lingers, if he can hear the pain in your throat as you speak into the shadows. 

“I just wish I could forget again. I wish I could forget him.”


	7. his eyes II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some added flesh to the story, written from Emet-Selch's perspective. We delve into the past again here, with some established lore that I embellished upon as needed (while still sticking to canon). I hope you all enjoy!

It occurred at the end of a day no less ordinary than the day before. 

When Solus zos Galvus closed his eyes for the final time, he was eased beneath a silken strata of plush bedding, with the fringes of twilight breaking through the vast window to the west side of his chambers. He had been alone, a most fitting end for a long life led in solitude and disappointment. A long life that should have not felt so for Emet-Selch, for he had lived a thousand thousand lifetimes and this one should have felt like all the rest—a small fleck of paint to the sweeping canvas. Somehow it did not. Perhaps because he had never felt so alive and mortal, so much like the squandering half-souls that trembled about him.

Multitudes of years tumbling into centuries into an eternity dedicated to one sole purpose—sewing the seeds of chaos to usher in the Ardor for his god, one after the other until finally the star would be made whole again and as it was all those millennia ago. Their brethren, _his_ brethren returned to him and all to be happily ever after as if this nightmare had never been. As if this was not some unhinged faerie tale, his bloodied fingers clutching for something to excise out the rot. To make those brutal cullings worth something in the end. And to make the death spread from his hand over the span of untold ages be made into something more than mere murder. 

This is what he had resigned himself to—he, Lahabrea, and Elidibus. There was naught more than devotion, underwritten by sacrifice and prayer. After Hydaelyn, after Zodiark had been shattered by Her and smote down to pieces, they spent themselves tireless in their task. With every umbral calamity and umbral era that followed at its heel, closer and closer they came to seeing their Father restored to His former glory. 

Emet-Selch had been intricately involved in the schema and workings of the Rejoinings—from helping the civilization of Allag to prosper only to tear it down with the Fourth Ardor, to building the Garlean Empire as a world power and thus fermenting the groundwork that had already been laid for the Seventh. From the outside, to his two fellow Paragons, he would have raised no red flags based on merit alone. His actions spoke for themselves as a testament to his faith in their purpose, delving even into the minutiae and seemingly immersing himself in it. He had always been more eccentric, estranged at times for indecipherable reasons. Though this was a trait that had carried on with Emet-Selch for as long as Elidibus and Lahabrea could remember, to the days of Amaurot. Nothing to worry themselves overmuch for. As long as their colleague stayed the course, what did it matter?

This is the stance that Elidibus had adopted by the time the Allagan Empire had been prospering, when Emet-Selch was funneling his energies into Emperor Xande. As demented as Xande already was, it had been mere child’s play to bend his ambitions to meld with that of the Ascians. During that time, it seemed as if their influence had reached new heights, with Allag’s rule having swallowed most of the Source at the peak of its reign. 

Many years later and with great foresight, Emet-Selch had been able to set the wheels in motion for not one but two calamities. Because with his sway alone, did Xande (albeit a clone) strive to obtain the power of the Voidsent and thus encase the primal Bahamut within Dalamud to harness enough said power to gain a portal to the World of Darkness, or the Thirteenth. There had been political dissent within Allag when Xande’s conquests came into question, with resistance groups forming to band against the unsound emperor and thence forced him to take refuge within the Syrcus Tower. Thus did Xande make the fatal decision to channel Dalamud’s power into the Tower to open a rift into the Void. And everything fell into place when the Tower faltered, slipping the overflow of energy straight into the ground and igniting the Fourth Umbral Calamity. The land was razed asunder and the Allagan Empire fell in tow.

It was during this time of the umbral era when their work had brought the star five times rejoined, that Emet-Selch had receded ever so much within himself. He whisked away to slumber, an excuse so often used before that Elidibus shrugged it off to see about the task of preparing for the next Ardor. Lahabrea had been more anxious, though his heated speech had amounted to naught.

LIttle did either know, this was when Emet-Selch first caught a glimpse of you. For it was then, your soul fives times rejoined, that you had shined the brightest and gleamed across the sky before his eyes one night. He felt something tear and shred, fraying within at the sight. Never before had he been so sure that it was _truly_ you. Many other times he’d had the half-witted notion, though the glimmer was so pale that he would not know until he met the soul in flesh. Then, as if it were inevitable, he would see that he was mistaken and desperately try to strip that lingering ache away to no avail.

But this time was different. Patiently he waited until your soul had been born into flesh again. Then still, he waited longer until you grew old enough to have some understanding. The Ascian slipped carefully under the guise of a child your age, around 12 years at the time. You were the daughter of a simple farmer, within a most simple village. Much of the land had been laid to waste until, with time and work, the soil had been cultivated enough to develop farmland amid the rubble and ruin of the scape. 

He had watched you from afar, behind the trunk of an ash tree. You were walking the perimeter of a weatherworn fence that enclosed a number of aldgoats, staring off into the horizon of broken mountain and scree. It was like looking at an apparition and nothing could stop his feet from carrying him to you. As the gravel and sparse grass crunched under his path, your eyes flitted to him. It was only then that he saw something else, a peculiar light feathering at the edges of your soul. It was Her, glaring through enough to make him stop in his tracks. 

“I’ve not seen you before,” you remarked, noting how he had abruptly stalled and deciding to meet him halfway. 

You were unafraid and too curious for your own good, painful mementos from times of eld for the strange boy who watched you pluck a lone wildflower with a sigh. Your fingers guided the flimsy flower into the sky, its lilac petals shivering and parting to break way to the easterly wind. 

“What’s wrong with you? Do you not speak?”

The boy cleared his throat and held his chin up, slightly indignant to your words. “Of course, I speak. And nothing is wrong with me. Why are you alone out here like this? It’s not safe.” It was only natural for his sense of vigilance for you to bleed through, as silly as he found his pubescent voice.

You scoffed at him, gently tossing the flower to the breeze and watching it sag back to the ground a few fulms away. “My home is just down the hill from here. Papa is not far, tending to the fields.”

Your finger started toying with the hem of your sleeve, actively trying not to stare before half-heartedly giving up. “What is your name?” 

The question was harmless, though it dug into him like a knife. Before thinking any wiser, he blurted it out. 

“Hades.”

A smile tugged at the corner of your mouth to the name, your eyes meeting his and appreciating how the sunlight caught and danced with the gold. 

Emet-Selch was reeling on the inside, just as he heard a man’s voice bellow out in the distance.

“Poppy! I need a hand!”

Your head jerked in the direction of the call, before turning back to him. “I’ve got to go,” you said, before flashing a blinding smile and taking off toward the hillside. 

He watched you run away until you were out of sight, the thundering in his chest being the only thing left in your wake. That, and the flower you touched. Unthinking, he walked until he reached where it lay to then scoop it up with a vacant stare. It mattered not that you were less than half of your former self, with your soul so achingly familiar. And it took everything for him not to dash after you. 

He had been too afraid that day.

  
  


For an unknowable stretch of time, Emet-Selch had gone astray after this. Enough for Elidibus to seek him out in the Rift, within a dwelling not far from the Chrysalis. It was unforeseen to find him there in so conspicuous a place, and as there had been no sign of him when last he checked. By then winter had fallen on the Source, blizzards and ice raking over the shard. Crops froze over and much of life was thereafter blotted out to naught, a zenith reached as the Fifth Umbral Calamity. The credit had chiefly belonged to Lahabrea with help from the sundered shade of Nabriales. And it seemed that the two aforementioned Ascians still found things to bicker about, as ludicrous as it was. Emet-Selch’s absence thus stirred the attention and concern of the Emissary, for the petty arguments could have been avoided altogether had he not vanished as was his wont.

“What have you done to pass your time as of late?” Elidibus posed the question directly, rather than playing with words. He had a slight notion as to why his counterpart was in such a state. The lost look in his eyes was telling.

Quickly, Emet-Selch shrugged and deflected. “Oh, you know. The usual. Napping and the sort. Have you missed my services very much?” He did not turn from where he stood, staring with unseeing eyes into the inky void that swam before him.

Elidibus stepped closer, before thinking better of it. “Never have you withdrawn for so long a period.” A plain observation, no more than necessary to rile the other Ascian—if indeed aught had been askew. Compared to he, the Architect wore his emotions on his sleeve. 

“Worry not for me, and seek me out when you actually require my assistance. If I receive no word, then I shall return when I deem it worthy of my time.” Emet-Selch said this with dryness lacing through his tone, a fist slowly clenching at his side before tucking it beneath crossed arms. “Until then, summon a shade and leave me be.” 

So there it was, such ire and edge. Though the Emissary would not know truly until much later. While he was no stranger to loss—no, they all had to carve out things which were dear to them—the strain of it had always dragged Hades at the heel. Within him lay a suffering that could never be shed through time nor invocation. His eyes were either closed behind lids with repose or glued to the skies, always searching. 

  
  


Whether to solidly prove a point or because he had grown weary from not getting his hands dirty enough during the Third Astral Era, Emet-Selch thrust himself wholly into the forefront of the effort for the Sixth. As Solus zos Galvus, he single-handedly built the Garlean Empire and expanded its grip to a myriad of neighboring nations with Ilsabard, Doma, and Ala Mhigo. Though its magitek would not touch the technology of Allag, Garlemald had never seen such dominion and prosperity. War had been ugly but he found himself pleasantly swept over by it, fueled by it with inward fury. The true goal had always been what was sought with Project Meteor and, despite its initial setback, the course was set for a seventh Rejoining with Dalamud to strike a deadly blow into the Source. And though Bahamut had ultimately been conquered, the Calamity would not be averted. All had been well and victorious on that front.

But the life that he had lived through until that point as Solus had inadvertently become something else to him, without notice or consent. 

Shortly after proclaiming himself emperor, he had been confronted with the task of finding an empress and siring a bloodline. By all means, he had expected as much would be necessary if he were to fully take on the lead part in this madhouse of theatre. And he found it easy, _too_ easy to become consumed by the charade he had so carefully constructed. Blame it on his love for the arts and fine wine or the simple idea that he was truly _living_ again with abandon. Despite the fact that these mortals who surrounded him were just barely hollowed echoes of a past long dead, he found himself forgetful at times. Or rather, many a time. When the merrymaking was full swing and the flesh beneath his touch was all fire and levin, it mattered so little in the moment. He became lost from within and began to do things that he never saw himself doing. Trusting when he shouldn’t, falling when he shouldn’t. 

As Solus, Emet-Selch never once left his vessel. He donned the skin like it was his own, grew old and had eventually resolved to reach a natural end as a mortal. The young Garlean man he had seized would have lived a stunted life, destined to wither away early from disease—it was written within the weave of his soul. Something the poor boy had managed to escape long enough for the right day to come along. It was tragic and, as distorted the notion was, the Ascian had done him a favour. 

Out of decorum, he had seen to that the man’s family was well cared for over the entirety of his lifetime as Solus, sending large sums of funds and goods, lavish presents and providing grand housing so that there would be naught left in wanting. He told himself it was decorum, no more than that. It would be a waste to dwell any further upon it. And the Empress had helped to encourage him. 

As much as it pained him to admit and as much as he kept his distance, the Empress still managed to slip beneath his skin. She was like any other noblewoman, idly chosen from the pool of prospects he had been presented with. There was nothing special about her, yet she had been kind and a great mother to the children. If he had given more of himself, perhaps he would have seen how good she could have been for him. Alas, his heart was not in it, not even half.

Truth be told, shackled in a mortal cage as he was, the Ascian had begun a most ruinous course of looking for you. It was shortly after he had been married, long repressed sentiments sinking their teeth in. It was not as if he had been chaste—nay, he indulged to be sure. But however hard he tried to forget, to focus on anything else, be it violence or debauchery or even prayer to his deity, nothing could wipe you from his mind. Drinking would help only ever so much and he could not run an empire whilst in his cups. 

So, with his hardline march through the surrounding domains, he would scour the skies and land for any sign of you. It would be when he reached the eastern continent of Othard that he would run into your most recent past life, a native warrior from the Xaela clan. The sight rendered him speechless.

Before his eyes, there you struck down his men on the plains, their blood spraying onto your pale flesh and staining into the soft blue of your plaits, coiled tightly with strange beads and gems. Dusked scales were exposed just so and wrapped over your trim body to set the starkest contrast. Even if your soul—now six times rejoined—did not burn before him as it had that day, as he stayed his forces so that no harm would come to you, there was no mistake that you were otherworldly, stunning and full of rage. He watched you butcher down his men until alone you stood, breathing wild and staring full on at him with blade still clenched in fist. You were surrounded by countless more, but that meant nothing to you. It took a number of added casualties to capture and bind you, then place you chained inside of a tent within the encampment for the night. 

When he came to you, he had no intention of keeping you bound. And he had decided that he would use magicks only if necessary. A large part of him hoped that you would somehow recognize him, even with all the frill and finery. Such a foolish wish but there it was all the same. 

You gazed coolly at him like he was a barbarian when he parted open the tent, taking care to secure its flap closed from behind. The guards had been dismissed, so that it was only you and he. 

Emet-Selch, full at his prime as Solus, treaded deeper with heavy footfall into the space where you were fettered to a steel stake, wrists gathered behind at the hip. His form towered over your own although, for how hard your eyes were set upon him with enmity, his pale gold eyes regarded you just as softly. It was unsettling.

“What do you want with me? Put me to death or set me free. I would sooner die than be a slave.” Your voice was little more than a hiss in your foreign tongue, twisting your wrists against the unyielding restraints to the point that it bruised. 

The Garlean sighed, looking ages older than he was at that moment. “I do not wish to hurt you, only to speak with you.” He knew your language and could even speak it, but if that was not enough of a revelation then there was to be more. With his words, spoken all too well, he snapped his fingers and your wrists were freed. A little shriek escaped your throat with the trick, eyebrows drifted high in alarm. 

“You are a mage? Are you not the Emperor from Garlemald?” There was more interest in your voice than you cared to convey. Suddenly, you caught the notion to school your features into a more unaffected expression as you saw the man perk up before you. 

A crooked smile worked its way to his dark lips and, as poor as the lighting was in the tent, you could appreciate how charming it was. The errant thought made you hate yourself because you had heard the tales. You knew this man was merciless and starved for power. Any show of resistance had been met with bloodshed. 

Though why was it that you did not feel that way around him, as he stepped closer and his smile only grew more beautiful under the glow of lamplight?

“I trust you will keep my secret.” His voice was a touch too intimate, and you realised that you had not tried to flee. For some inexplicable reason, you did not want to.

He remained at a respectable distance, holding an arm out towards you with a prim and white gloved palm turned aloft. The sound of metal clinking against leather filled the silence of the tent. “Solus zos Galvus, Emperor of Garlemald. At your service, my lady.” As he extended his hand, frosted bangs fell over his brow in boyish form. 

Before you could stop yourself, your hand was already enfolded within silk, the warmth of his lips gently pressed to your knuckle. “Cirina Avagnar,” you murmured, eyes never leaving his gaze. 

It had felt like a dream, a hazed string of words which ribboned into conversation and eventually laughter. He summoned food and wine out of thin air, with ridiculous flourish you chided him for without much thought. There was little sense to how natural it all was, but the two of you talked into the night as if you had known one another for ages. With ease, you admitted that you were an orphan and had grown up on the steppe within the yoke of the Adarkim tribe, of whom you truthfully harboured no allegiance to. The Adarkim had slaughtered your tribe, absorbing what was left of its survivors as their own. 

You wondered why you so freely told the Emperor your true name but it became lost as you found yourself confiding more and more in him. He, in turn, shared the story of his life and family, yet he was more quiet about the specifics of battle and conquest. While it would be difficult for you know him well enough so soon, it seemed as though he was very modest or perhaps even ashamed. There was this sorrow about him, the more closely you watched. He looked as if he wanted to tell you so much more than what was falling from his lips, as if he had the world on his shoulders. And it was, he would just never tell you as much. 

Time ebbed away the waning night into dawn and it was over.

That day, Emet-Selch was reminded of how truly ephemeral a sundered life could be.

You were half out of your mind. You had agreed to go with him back to Garlemald and it felt so surreal as he jogged back to the imperial base to discuss some issue that had arisen. Since the guards had been dismissed, no one paid any mind as you stepped outside of the tent with arms stretched into the morning light. The sky was glorious with cyan steeped into cobalt blue. 

No one heard them coming. You did not see the arrow before it split into your chest.

He had been too late that day. More like than not, too happy as well. 

And he would not be able to while it away with sleep this time around. 

Over the span of his life as Solus, Emet-Selch would know more pain than happiness. He wondered if stepping into this existence had deadened him a bit further on the inside. 

In the later years, Solus could not bring himself to care much for the Empress or the family that he had sired. That repulsive feeling of affection that he had felt when he held his firstborn son, something that had once dug its claws into him, it would grow to wilt away and turn to ash when the boy died shortly after Varis was born. An incurable illness that wasted the young man into nothing. No amount of magicks could quell nor allay it. As unfair as it was, Varis would be punished for the untimely death of his father. Solus could not allow that weakness to clutch to him as before and was sorely reminded every time he looked at his grandchild. Matters were not alleviated with a great grandson, only worsened. 

For the concluding goal, why any of this came to be, these set of circumstances were _perfect_ —a broken royal family with no room for love, only the hate and blood that bound them. 

It would seem as if it had been planned all along, so very played out and pathetic.

Once the Calamity had fallen on the Source and his work had been completed, he would only live several years more before he allowed himself to succumb to old age. The vultures would be left to tangle and squabble for the throne. It was poetic and fitting. At long last, he would know peace with eternal slumber. 

But of course Emet-Selch knew that his rest would not be _eternal_ , though he’d had the mind that it would in the least have endured longer than a paltry handful of years.

It was quite the emergency, he would have to agree. Lahabrea had been so foolish, so impulsive and reckless. And so the Architect would be roused to clean his mess. This Warrior of Light had undone much of what he had accomplished during his pageantry as Solus, and all within the brief span of time that he had been asleep. It was not the first time that he’d had to contend with someone meddling with his affairs, but this was truly _infuriating_.

So Emet-Selch followed the hero to the First, without a word to Elidibus of his whereabouts. He canted his chin on up to the oppressive white hanging above, a sky that had been as good as painted by his own hand. He followed their path, to cut them to the quick.

Yet when he caught a glimpse of them for the first time with his own eyes… he knew then. That this was naught more than a satire, stripped from a long forgotten playbook. 

He had resigned to watch from afar, biding his time quietly and turning over all the options in his mind. 

And then a most curious feeling had settled over him when he looked at you trouncing about in Il Mheg at one point, for it felt as though he had reached a stalemate within himself. The Light was already overtaking you, devouring the fibre and essence of your soul, washing out its vibrant colour. But you were _smiling_ , so very radiantly at that. As though your heart was free and all was well, despite of the fact that you were trying to hold all of the pieces in place. 

He did not want to hurt you, as much as the fates were aligned for him to do so—as much as that deeply wound, leaden manacle was wielding his hand.

All that he—all that Hades wanted in that moment was to save you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was very nearly tempted to play around with the theory that Emet-Selch was Xande, or at least his clone. I love that shit but obviously does not fit here. A very interesting fic idea for future thought.
> 
> Massive fluff incoming with next chapter, just a warning... <3


	8. i found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj6V_a1-EUA) pretty love song by Amber Run. I should add the warning that the video for this link does display abduction, slightly graphic in nature.

“I just wish I could forget again. I wish I could forget him.” 

The words crack feebly against the sob coiled at your throat, their power wasted by lungs bereft of the strength to so much as scorn the Ascian properly. 

A waft of shadow seeps into the periphery yet the transference of aether goes unnoticed within the quiet of the darkened room. Much of your senses to the aetherial have been deadened at present, with the tonic working its way into muscle and bone. However, what _is_ felt is a gentle tug at the sheets from under your back. Then the gradual warmth of a presence although you are too disoriented and simply too _tired_ to twist your neck to investigate. 

“If you truly wish, I can make the memories go away. If at least, to a degree... I can help to suppress them for you.” 

That sound, its tone is smooth like velvet and yet grated with an undernote of something akin to pain. It serves to pull you into some form of sentience. Only then do you realise that you have been holding your breath, as you tilt your chin to its source and a shivering exhale breaks from your lips. Although the sun had long set and the chill of dusk has already slipped in from the unlatched window, your eyes need only to strain so much to see him. A hot tear falls from the fringe of an eyelash, dripping onto the linen below.

“I don’t want that." The confession hushes from your tongue with nary a thought, despite the fact that those selfsame memories have been keeping you sleepless and unbalanced as of late. 

For a split second, there is a touch of embarrassment to the statement, as if you have confessed something else with those words—something implicit that he can read through as a book when paired with the marked dysphoria. The sentiment drifts over your awareness the longer you focus on the Ascian and what is left is a feathering of intense heat to your cheeks. You make a silent and stillborn prayer to Hydaelyn or whatever god who may be listening that he cannot see how flushed you are, that the gloaming bathes over in the most convenient of angles.

Emet-Selch—nay, _Hades_ meets your wary gaze as he lies beside you, the same plain black robes from before pooled upon the bedding in oddly refined fashion. The faint glimmer of his pearl earring catches your eye as the only token borrowed from his former Garlean regalia. His expression is cryptic, devoid of any real emotion. And he is more striking than ever for how detached he appears, sculpted face like some divine statue of eld. 

The curve of his jaw is braced by a loosely held fist while he faces you, an elbow bent and supporting his weight. Somehow the pallor of his skin is greater, or in the least appears moreso because of the moonless pitch beneath his eyes. The reflection of candlelight chases about within his irises, rich gold illuminated and you wonder then and there if he sincerely wants to let you go. If this is all too much and more than either of you bargained for. 

“I have said the same of you, so many times over. I told myself that I wanted to forget. To erase you from my mind and lead an existence without you.”

His voice lays heavy in the breadth of space between, for as lightly as it has been whispered. But of course, that should come as no surprise. The smattering of knowledge you have gained in the span of a few days—it bears no comparison to the never-ending burden he has carried for untold millennia.

Yet, how many times is all you can think. How long has he wanted to forget? 

How blind and stupid have you been to _everything_ around you? To have lost and found him, you’ve no idea what to do nor what to say.

And then you numbly feel arms gather you close, bare fingers reaching out to cup your face into the palm of a hand. To pull your glazen eyes to look at him as he says the next words. For a mere whit of a moment, it feels as if he has plucked your soul raw from flesh and your body needs to sprint to catch up with the movement. But the warm touch of his skin becomes sobering, sealing and stitching you together again. The firm lines of his long body stretched along yours feels _so very_ right and all too _real_.

“Though I would never truly wish to forget you...” That rich gold sweeps over your countenance—searching and seemingly trying to capture everything to memory. It is a fleeting notion, but it is as though he has done this so many times before. "And I fear that a life without you is not an existence that I want to live through again." 

A fluttering spreads from under your sternum to what he is saying, the way he is speaking to you, the way his embrace begins twining itself around your skin as if you’ve long since been lovers. 

“What do you want from me then?” 

It throws you off to a degree when you hear your own voice, for how winded your breathing has become. But you want to hear him say it, no matter how besotted you sound. Soft white bangs tickle against your nose as he melts you in his hands, wandering eyes resting on yours with intent.

“I’ve only ever wanted this— _you_.” Fingertips brush up along your stomach and then ribcage, bunching over the thin fabric of your tunic. “Everything you are, I want to _take_. I want it _all_.” The inflection of his words bite through the haze, prickle over your flesh and reach deep as if razing something buried from within. 

Your heart is rushing to the point it has nearly broken out of your chest as he moves his lips to your brow to press a kiss. It is soft and lingering and full of reverence, while his fingers trail up along your cheek to capture the tears freely streaming into tousled hair. The fog from the tincture lifts from the whole of your being almost instantly to his touch, sparks of electricity rolling down your vertebrae. Your vision sharpens and you can feel his skin against yours on a different plane, with a burning heat you had not noted before. It is then that you realise that you are only wearing that tunic and some measly smallclothes. Yet you cannot stop to think of _when_ or _why_ or _how_ your bottoms slipped away and unbeknownst to you, for his aether is bending against your own, swelling over and stealing your breath in the same beat as his body.

"I had the mind to lock you in your room and throw away the key at your act of foolishness," Hades purrs while still attempting to dry the tears. “Tonics and spirits will not make things any easier for you. Such frivolities will not bestow you with the answers.” His thumb grazes the top of your cheekbone, tracing over down the hollow before tapping a forefinger to your temple. “Some are yet here. You need only to clear your head and concentrate.”

As you look back at him, you know he speaks the truth. Only...

“Will you help me?”

You ask this quietly as a hand drags upward to meet the silk of his burgundy hair, fingers catching and carding through into the fringe of white. Carefully you curl a strand around a digit, admiring its lustre even under the poor light until you tear your eyes away to lock with his. 

“Help me to remember, Hades.” 

Just as you say his true name, his lips are brushing along yours into a most delicate touch. A small moan rumbles from your throat while reaching your arms around his neck in an effort to pull him closer. His hands find their way into your hair, combing through to cradle you in place as his tongue teases slow over your bottom lip. There is a gentleness to his ministrations that makes your breath shudder against his mouth, to which he breaks from so to snag your pout with sharp teeth. Quickly what once was soft has become something else, brimming with need as he deepens the kiss and smothers your gasps. He tastes both tart and sweet upon your tongue—notes of wine laced with blood.

It is with ease that your leg has twisted over his hip, sending your head dizzy with the sensation of a firm and telltale heat edging _just so_ between your thighs. One hand has freed itself from your length of hair to run down to meet at your hips, long fingers grasping aggressively into yielding flesh and guiding your sex flush against his. The motion is versed and unfair, drawing pitiful whimpers that he quickly swallows as before. The blush at your skin is searing, the trembling of your body veritable. 

As if his form pressed against you in such a manner is not enough, you can also keenly feel his aether as it winds through and over your own, stroking with an intimacy you have yet to experience with another. But then again, you’ve never met—let alone ever _been_ with anyone as skilled as you can only assume he would be for all of the ages he has lived. And never with anyone with such godlike power, teeming and throbbing under tender flesh. Immortal and blessed with the ability to snap you just as a twig, more like than not. At this very minute, he makes you feel like a virgin as he pulls his intoxicating essence through all facets of your senses, seeking and spreading like fingers through every nook and crevice, thus making you a quivering mess beneath him. A thought dances through your mind as to whether you could even last half a bell in bed with the Ascian, though you would love to try and find out...

Hades pulls from your lips, hot breath falling down the slope of your neck as he still clutches you to him. With your back arched, shirt hiked up with breasts heaving uncomfortable in tension across the thinned fabric—you are the perfect canvas of lech and frailty in his arms whilst you fight to suck air into your lungs.

“Are you sure you want this?” he asks evenly into the stillness of the room, though your eyes are of glass and the ache in your loins is blurring all lines of thought.

You try to focus on him and fret over the words to say that will _not_ make you sound like the needy thing you are. There are still so many questions, so much that has been left unsaid but you find yourself nudging his forehead with your own, pressing your burning and perspiring skin against his third eye. It feels foreign and familiar at once, its slight protrusion pushing cool yet surprisingly soft. While doing this, your hips are slowly grinding upwards over his, eyes closed and relishing in the way his body feels. A hiss is drawn from his teeth into your throat when you throw your head back in the movement, driving your heat along his length through robes made fine but much too thin. You cannot think for how much you want, how much you _need_ him inside of you—as if all of the answers are there and waiting, just so long as you can get him to fuck you into cognition.

The Ascian begins peppering kisses over the curve of your neck, rendering you a small yet winning thrill by continuing to allow you to work your hips into him from underneath. Soft lips and tongue drag sweetly over the pulsing skin above your jugular, taking pause to suck a welt that would be sure to not go amiss. His fingers first lace tenderly into your hair, then twist to pull taut and firm at the nape of your neck before you hear his gravelly voice rasp hot into your ear. “You’d do well not to tease, lest I lose my patience with this dalliance and show you _precisely_ how ungentlemanlike my attentions can become.” 

His threat quickens the blood, roiling nigh unbearable fire from head to toe. The smile that spreads over your mouth seems borne from instinct as you feel him strongly press back into you, using the hand not currently buried in your hair to slide your shirt and flimsy bra aloft unceremoniously. The cool air licks at your bare skin but for an instant before his mouth is suckling hungrily at a nipple, the heat of his breath fanning over your breast with tongue rolling and flicking wet over the hardened nub. 

"Gods, yes. Hades…"

With every moan that leaves your throat, his fingers hook tighter at your locks and drag your neck back, back until your spine is arched like a bow and his mouth is nigh suffocated by the mound of flesh upon his lips. His hand has made claim of the other breast, kneading and pinching delicately at the skin in a manner that is striking to how roughly he is tugging your head back. Your thighs are wrapped around his lean hips, crumpling and laying ruin to his robes. The solid length pulsing along the dampened and sheer fabric of your pantalettes is making you squirm from underneath, fingers fumbling to reach for his trappings to tear them loose. To feel no boundary of fabric between. Alas, he has you pinned in place like an insect.

Dark aether ghosts over your body, running cool along its heat as Hades runs open mouthed kisses to the low valley of your sternum, his hand releasing from your hair to grasp at your backside. His other hand follows suit and hoists you with ease to straddle him at the hip until you are in his lap, thrust above him. Golden eyes pierce up and through you into an intense gaze while you watch his tongue trail a slow and scorched path to the breast it has yet to taste. 

“If only you knew how long I’ve waited to put my mouth on you, my dearest,” Hades croons quietly into your pebbled flesh, alternating between laving his tongue mellow and scraping his teeth wicked. You cannot decide which you like best, as his fingers swipe over your navel to slip south and you feel yourself shiver in anticipation. 

The thrumming in your ribs is cresting to the point you fear he must hear it as your hands weakly find purchase in his slightly mussed mane, raking your touch through its length into the shorter hair of his nape. Looking back, it would be difficult to determine when the pressure built and stacked upon itself, mounting into a spike of strangling agony. It feels like a blade of hellfire ripping into your heart and the strength gives way in your limbs with a wheezing gasp. Large hands grasp into your waist, your body slipping down steady against Hades. His mouth drags and runs over your skin in a salacious manner as he holds you, while it feels as though your aether is being threaded and snagged and teased apart by his own. The Light feeds away from within to every pull and every twist. And it is visceral in a most base form, driving deep while you coil your arms and legs snug around him as an anchor. Pain ebbs sharply into unfettered pleasure and your eyes drift to close from the power of it. 

“What are you doing to me?” you manage to whisper between the hisses and mewls, slowly realising that you are pressing your sorely neglected sex into him again. 

His answer is a kiss, chaste and saccharine, as you feel a hand fall back down to your backside as if to press you somehow more flush to him. Your eyes instinctively crack open when he pulls away for him to only seek your mouth again. As you look at him before you, just as he leans in—you see the colour again. The bend of crimson rouses you to hold him back, hand splayed at the plane of his broad chest. Half-lidded and tongue skimming along his bottom lip, he appears dazed if not a little disheartened by your gesture, though this would be the least of your worries. 

Strokes of red flood your vision—similar to when last you were with him in this very bed. And that fade of a glow is swimming at its margins. The more you closely you peer into Hades, the more you realise that the vibrant hue is not simply suffused with his aether... that it is _not_ his aether you are seeing at all as it bleeds forth like blood from somewhere endless within.

“Your soul… Do you know the colour of your soul?” 

It is said before your mind registers what it is you are asking. The fingers at your hip quicken into flesh to feel more like claws as his other hand grips your chin rather harsh to meet him full in the eye. His expression does not attempt to mask the blow your question has dealt.

“ _What_ did you ask me?” he murmurs, an octave dropped in his voice. “What do you see?”

You stare back at him, attempting to focus more carefully through the tangle of crimson. His patience swiftly gets the best of him.

“Tell me what it is that you see, my love.”

Hades’s voice is more of a plea than aught else, and you have those godsdamned tears pricking behind your lids again to the look he is giving you. As if you are the center of his universe, and there is nothing that lies between. The sad thing is that you know this is not the case, for there are mountains and oceans between you both. You want to love him—this notion hits you hard, _desperately_ as you regard him, the colour fading away with your burning resolve. But even with the idea that he has saved your life and perhaps killed Vauthry to aid your plight, what does that stand for against your god? His god?

“I see red, within you. I cannot explain it. I saw it before the other day but I never said anything,” you say softly, before sighing as his fingers drop lifeless from your chin. His other hand has loosened from over your hip, but still lingers while he gazes back at you in a stupor.

“It is your soul, is it not? How can I see it now? Wait... is it from when you siphoned the Light from me?”

Your hands are curled into the fall of robes at his sides, nails biting into your palms with tension. He does not answer, but swallows thickly and pivots his chin to the reach of shadows within the lofty room. It makes him appear so profoundly vulnerable in the moment, the likes of which you had not seen since that day at the Ladder. Apart from your last dream of him. 

It is such a strange thing to take in, this damaged creature on your bed—someone that any of your comrades would view as naught more than a foe manifested from a nightmare. Because he had been Solus zos Galvus, the founding father of the Garlean Empire with legions of corpses strewn before his feet— _and then_ also an Ascian for the allegorical cherry on top. You had heard the stories from when you were but a small child, of the wars and the crushing of nations from under his polished heel. And you grew up to them, reading sundry tomes scrawled from the annals of Garlean history to confirm tall tales instead of carousing with friends. Until you would be poised to put a blade to his neck, or rather to the chaos that he had created before you ever had the chance to fight.

Though no one would know of your secret fascination with him. Not one of the Scions could have guessed how dumbstruck you had been that day you first saw him at the Crystarium. The tremor of your hand when he would draw too close during your travels. The glances you would steal when you thought no one was watching, and the many times that he caught you red-handed with that wolfish smirk. How you had waited for the opportunity to slip that mask of his off, because you had to _know_. There was more than just a villain to play against your part of the hero. You just could have never fathomed how much more there was to him, to you, to your past _with_ him, hidden just beneath the surface and right before your eyes.

For all of your deeds to undo his wrongs, for all of the blood you have struggled to scour away with rags made more soaked by your own butchery, where does that leave you both standing on the battlefield? When there is just as much which binds you as what is tearing you apart.

“I have dreamt of you, Hades." You spread your fingers along his finely angled jawline and over his cheekbone without thinking first. A bloom of fire engulfs the whole of your face when he pulls his glowing eyes back to you. “Of a bedroom, you and me...” Your other hand sifts with care through the silken stroke of white over his brow. You notice the tremor in your touch and wonder if he sees it too. “Your hair was the colour of fresh snow, like this.”

A shallow gasp catches in your throat when his hand links around your wrist at his skin, though you do not let it stop what needs to be said. You command the thoughts to spill from your lips even as he leans into you, resting his forehead to yours and an ache seethes in your breast. “And then everything changed. The both of us changed… I tried to fix it, to… I tried so hard but ev-everyone was _dead_ and there was only me left standing. Then we were saying goodbye.” 

The words are a mess from your tongue, muddled and weak. Your eyelids fall to the tears running heavy tracks down your skin. His thumbs swipe some away, his lips press into the others. You feel his warm breath at the corner of your mouth, licking the salt before he seizes your lips into a slow and languishing kiss. Fingertips start to gently stroke illegible patterns over the flesh just above your collarbone, a soothing gesture that brings indescribable comfort. The moment is something you both become lost in, wasted in as your current reality crumbles to pieces and all you care for is to know how it would be like to be loved by him, for you to love him back—unconditionally. As if naught else mattered, and the fates be damned before they would drive you from him again.

Hades says something after breaking away, when—like a fool—your mouth drifts to follow, to taste him once more for you could never get enough. His hands caress your face, stirring you to open your eyes and become transfixed by the paled gold of his as he speaks.

“I want to show you something. It may help you to remember.”

There is a wistfulness coating the low tone of his cadence, a secreted hope lilting at the edges that finds you immediately nodding your head in approval. Something flashes like the sun in his countenance and he is pulling you from the bed, scooping you into his arms all too easily before you can do aught to stop him. Heart lurching and mouth hung open, you cling onto broad shoulders as he carries you like a blushing bride.

“Where are we going?!” You nearly squeal this out, as it dawns on you how little you are wearing. 

A snap echoes into the silence and a deep chuckle follows, making your hair raise on end. Then Hades takes a steady stride towards a dark corner of the room, into the shadows and you cannot see but only trust your gut that he is chasing you off into a portal. The chill of aether sweeps over your flesh and it is shameful to note how you bury your nose into the crook of his neck. His hold on you shifts to tighten his embrace, warming you from the inside. It takes only takes a handful of seconds and he is dropping you to your feet, the sight opening before your hesitant scrutiny. And it is all too familiar. 

You recognize the stretching towers, the countless windows aglow and graced perfectly against rich stone. The spiralling spires rising into the obsidian sky. 

But there are no stars here.

You do not realise that your feet have you spinning around like a child, twirling with your eyes cast aloft and wide open to a world plucked from far-fetched dreams. The only thing that makes you stop is the trickle of pain in your temple, vision settling and becoming glued to the trees of lush lavender that are spangled here and there, ‘twixt the sidewalks, parkways, and buildings. Later you would come to discover that you are standing within the Polyleritae District, just a matter of yalms west from the Bureau of the Architect. A place you used to frequent all too often, enough to receive multiple scoldings from Elidibus for your impropriety. 

Something brushes down the side of your hand and you turn your head to see Hades standing beside you. His own perusal is trapped and tangled amidst amethyst branches from the same tree you had been admiring. Only then you catch on that you are wearing robes, steeped in ebony to match his. Kicking a foot forward as you take in your appearance, you see the sheen of black and heeled mary janes. Breathless and trying to shake the feeling that your brain is swimming in a cloud, your fingers thread through his to clutch to him for balance. Warmth gathers at your hip from where he braces you, holding your form against him to keep you from crashing onto the grit of carved pavement. 

“I know this place… from my mind, my dreams.” His embrace grows ever more for your utterance, vermilion lips drifting apart as his jaw goes lax. “How? I thought the city… Amaurot. I thought it long gone.” The ancient name sounds rich from your voice, almost resonant.

His expression darkens, one hand coming to rest low at your waist. And then he grazes his mouth over your forehead, the other hand weaving through your hair to pull some stray strands from your face. “I created this phantom city long ago, out of yearning for what was lost to us. I did it as a means to escape…” 

He is not helping your breathing problem when he strokes his fingers through your tresses and brings them to tip your chin up, drawing away just enough to have you meet him in the eye. “I did it for you. For a day like this, to help you to remember.” 

Then you are the one to breach the distance, looping your arms around Hades’s neck to kiss him like something snagged out of a romance novella from Tataru’s private stash. 

More than anything, you want to remember. And with this kiss—vestured in robes stolen from the past, rootless within the spectre of a city that died a thousand thousand lifetimes ago—your feet feel as though they have been running in circles in a place right where they belong.

And your heart is laid open at this Ascian's toes, for it has always been his to begin with.


	9. sunlight and fallen petals

The notion of walking the neatly paved streets of Amaurot renders nameless sentiments, treading down paths that once used to wisp and fray into the dead ends of dreams. Dreams that have spun and stretched for the span of your life, so long a part of you that—when you truly think of it—they are bound to your past as memories. For one long moment, when you first hold Hades’s hand and begin to take your first steps beside him in the dreary allure of the city, the thought slowly sinks in that there had never really been a difference between your dreams or memories at all.

You know that as your hand clings more tightly to Hades, tensed and small fingers bending through his much longer ones, that you could not hope to stand on your own two feet. It is as though if he were to let you go, your limbs would tumble down upon themselves along with your mind, into a sea of nerves and disquiet. He becomes your rock, your anchor to clutch on as you take everything in, and it is so much—the intricate shape of this place, still so if only a copy by nature. It haunts you even as you stand within its walls. You take care not to let it show, the outright _terror_ coursing along your veins from the unknown of what is to come by you being here, throwing the last vestiges of caution to the wind. Through it all, his hand squeezes yours in reassurance and he does not pressure you. He allows you to take from it what you will, at your own pace. He stands as your guide, no more. Until you ask too many questions. Whether right or wrong, they serve to pull you in deep to where there could be no true deliverance, be it from him or yourself. 

* * *

With skin scalding and ankles trembling from above tipped toes, you part your lips from Hades and try to recall how to breathe. All in this small moment that stretches for malms, there is a faint and inebriated feeling that washes over as your form settles without restraint into his embrace with a sigh. You can practically feel the crooked smirk spreading over Hades’s mouth from just over your nose. 

“Pray tell me, what sort of favour may I carry out to receive a kiss such as _that_ again?” 

His voice has dipped an octave or so, and it is as if you have only just realised the disparity in height when his breath puffs heat over the crown of your head. Your eyes drift open, lids heavy with a coy smile of your own and you attempt to pull away to conceal how much more red you _know_ your face has become from his flirtation. Alas, with a chuckle, he does not relent his snug hold about your waist and instead begins to feather his lips along your temple. It is tender, achingly so. Your mind scrambles in the gutter to decide exactly what “sort of favour” Hades could offer, when a token of caprice strikes. 

Taken by a whim and galvanised by his undivided attention, you grasp his hand from around your body and angle your chin to the side. Then, with an unusual amount of finesse, your fingers deftly lace through his to arc an elbow aloft and pirouette from his arms. It is so effortless, dredging up thoughts that you had done this before—something like déjà vu, so to speak. And it does the trick as intended, freeing you from his clutches so you can fan yourself off for a minute. 

Hades watches on with intrigue as you raise your eyes to meet his from over your shoulder, lips curling into a simper. “Show me the sights, O ancient one,” you croon playfully, dropping your hand down and tugging him forward as you begin to step into the silence of the streets. “Give me the grand tour and mayhap we will see about a second kiss.”

Your gait is purposeful and your grip around his hand is firm, dragging Hades along just as sure as you drag the deep laughter from his lungs. It is somewhat reminiscent of that afternoon at the Ladder, when he first pulled you forth with little preamble and rewrote what was scripted in the stars. Yet what a fool you must appear as you turn the stupid grin on your face towards him and falter when you catch the way he is looking at you, intensely with golden eyes alight by something you find yourself afraid to name. Quickly you divert your gaze and, when that does little to assuage the sudden unease, you then twist your neck away to simply hide it. 

“Come on, Hades! Age before beauty, as they say...” Your voice lilts as a song, reaching tall into the hushed sky.

The Ascian scoffs, sending you into a fit of giggles as he wraps his arms thoroughly around your frame from behind and twirls you about with robes billowing in the air. As soon as he lands you on your feet again, he presses his mouth over your ear and growls low. “Now, now my dear. Insolence will do naught but bring you a good spanking.” And you can only chew at your bottom lip and focus on slowing your pulse, footfall now struggling to keep up as he pulls you onwards to the center of the city.

Although Amaurot is as surely woven from your mind and thus all at once familiar, seeing it made manifest and adorned with such meticulous, _exhaustive_ detail—it brings you great pause.

The manner with which the dark grilles of some, though not all, of the windows curve and break off into curious lines and angles. A rounded sweep here, a sharpened point there—coalescing into stunning and unique configurations, the likes of which you have never seen on the Source nor on its reflection. The very glass itself is fashioned into a chroma of purples, deep violet ebbing into sheer lilac. Other windows glow yellow, interspersed with the amethystine and soar impossibly high into the pitch above. 

There is an architectural signature to the many buildings lining the pavement, certain elements linked and bound which immediately catch your attention. Inlaid brick and opal wedged within the face of finely chiseled stone, paired with rolling arches and massive filigreed doors. The purple spectrum from the windows is borrowed and imbued within calculated facets of the parkways, from darksome archways studded with luminescent gems down to the bursts of colour from the trees. In the midst of this, you cannot help but to notice the blankets of vines draped over the premises in seemingly random fashion. The unruly tangles of verdure set a stark, strange contrast to the immaculate scape of the surroundings.

“Everything is so huge…” 

More and more, you feel you must sound and look like an effervescent child running around. But it does not matter so much when you notice the smiles you stir from your favourite Ascian. Onward you dip to-and-fro, in-and-out of alleys, parks and buildings—the insides of which are stunning beyond words with broad stripes of glimmering gold set against rich black and white marble. Great chandeliers hang within every establishment, lighting over vast spaces with seating far too large and counters much too tall. Hades explains that the stature of the ancients had been on a different scale before the sundering, towering to your perspective. Just as the soul had been cleaved down to lesser, so had the body along with everything else. You do not quite gather what he says until you spy something that resembles a giant phantom, walking in the distance along what you would come to know as the Macarenses Angle. Donned in robes just as yours, with a white mask just barely seen that makes you waver where you stand.

“Where did they come from?” you ask softly, feeling as though you have stepped back into the thickened brume of a dream yet again. Suddenly it begins to make sense, the margins of your memory bleeding into reality. 

Hades seems to regress ever so beside you, motionless with shoulders slumped and voice threadbare as he speaks. “They are fabrications, as is everything here. I could not have created a parallel of Amaurot without them. Mere shades of our people, nothing more.”

There is a wistfulness twisted in his expression, in the way the eyes hold and the lips part with reverie. You step closer so that you may trail your fingers down the long length of his arm and hold his hand, pushing past the butterflies to lean your chin against his shoulder. In turn, his mouth brushes against your brow and his chest caves in deep with a sigh that feels as if it had been begging to be freed. For a moment more, you both remain there like that, until you wrap your free arm around him and tug him along.

As you both roam on, your interest becomes captured by one of the many high-reaching streetlamps that sprinkle along the path. Imposing yet tenuous and waiflike, the lights resemble stemmed lilies skirting the entire city with bowed posts and glass tempered into furled, downturned petals. For however simple they would seem, your eyes keep following them, with fingernails digging into the flesh of your palm in tension.

“What was I like back then?” 

It is a question that slips absentmindedly from your lips as Hades walks you beside a building that he has explained as a school of sorts, the Akadaemia Anyder. The words cross many lines and breach an intimacy that you do not stop to consider. Not to mention what it means to him for you to ask such a thing, with all of your history.

The falter in his pace and posture bring it all to the forefront of your mind, your fingers flexing against his with unforeseen understanding. His head turns to you, meeting your gaze. 

“You were everything I was not. Impetuous, fearless, and strong-willed.” 

Your mouth opens to speak, though the only thing that comes is a weak pull of air—something akin to a gasp but soundless and broken. Hades lifts the hand he is holding, thumb brushing across your knuckles in a gesture that makes your eyes burn. Carefully he takes that hand into the both of his, focus trained on the bend of your fingers, the bones and tendons beneath scarred skin. 

“You had a way with every soul you encountered, any of whom had been graced by your presence. Your gift for bringing wonder and beauty to life… It touched everyone as sure as your warmth had.”

Hades begins tracing his forefinger along the many ugly marks on the back of your hand, and it grounds you solid as he continues.

“In the past, with the unsundered and adamant nature of our souls, the power to create was but at the tip of one’s fingers. Though not all possessed the resolve and ingenuity such magicks required to make any use or sense of their power. Thus, it was a study that one could follow to develop and perfect at the Akadaemia. There, you had been one of the greatest professors I had ever known.”

There is a powerful swell felt in your chest as you listen to his voice, with all the cadence and skill of a well-versed storyteller. Your chin cants toward the structure, slightly more modest in construction and covered with trails of vines. The desire to enter its walls strikes heavily.

“You gave the most compelling lectures though, dare I say it, your tendency for insufficient planning would often cause things to go awry.” His words are interrupted by a breathy chuckle that drives your heart under with how it is heard more from his nose than from his lips. A pang of unspoken nostalgia that you can _feel_ from him. “One time, your antics well nigh imploded the entire lecture hall. I believe it was some demonstration involving a new variety of conifer?”

A tickle of laughter bubbles up your own throat and you cannot understand why what he is saying is making sense, but it is. “Ah, why does that not surprise me?”

There is a gentle squeeze to your hand that bids you to stare up at the man before you, dark hair with white falling over his brow, shadowing the pale glow of his eyes. Hades meets your careful regard with intent. “You may have made a mess or two, but you never ran from your troubles. Rather, you faced them without fear and you taught others from your mistakes. In turn, you gained their devotion and respect… their love.”

Something in the way he utters the last syllable makes your skin feel as if you have broken into a cold sweat. His gaze is open, honest—as if there is a confession there just beneath and he is laying himself bare. Then his fingers come to twine around yours, slow and measured before he cups his other hand over your cheek. Without thinking, you lean into his touch and close your eyes to the warmth. “Even with your soul as it is now, you have not changed…”

His whisper clips off in a manner that sounds as if he intended to say more. But his mouth is at your lips and soon you forget why you cared to begin with, when his tongue teases against yours into a kiss that feels raw and full of need. Faintly you remember you were going to forbear any such advances in jest, but what does any of that matter? You allow him to fold over you, to relish in you as the scent of lavender fills your lungs—from whence it came, you’ve no idea. After a few moments that feel all too short, he is the first to break from you—pulling his lips back, scant breath mingling with yours all while seeming as though he wants more. That look lingers in his eyes for only an instant after and then it is gone. He grasps your hand tight and onward you amble along beside him, as if nothing happened. The tension becomes palpable thereafter, with every step taken.

Just as any other city, Amaurot is riddled with a myriad of establishments—apartments, restaurants, hotels, even medical plazas. Just as any other, it has a capitol of sorts. The construction is quite formidable, strutted on immense pillars inlaid with the selfsame brick and opal of the surrounding buildings. Though instead of straight lines, curves of stone jut outward and above in a manner that sets its design apart from the rest. 

From its stately entrance, vines spread on both the eastern and western ends of the edifice, reaching on high along its tower. Paired with the strange tendrils of onyx heaving skyward, the Capitol is a thing of forlorn beauty. When your eyes fall away, they become snared by the twist of dead branches upon a tree nearby. Something is astray, skewed and inherently flawed here—the notion hits you unforeseen. This place is just as lost and broken as the powerful mage who created it.

It is there at the tip of your tongue when his arm skims against yours, and as you pull from him to step towards the set of three colossal doors laced in lush gold. Your breath is stolen while you slip through the one at its center, doors split wide to a hall laden in black and white marble, strokes of dazzling aureate sheen spread fine over both floors and walls alike. While the colours are borrowed from the other areas you have observed, its motif is altogether something far more resplendent. As if made a sacred shrine and not for your toes to tread upon, you feel like a speck of a stain while you edge in deeper—a tiny scratch carved into the polished shine of the floor. 

It does not come as an epiphany. Rather, it flows in as a thought as natural as any other because that is all it truly is. 

You remember, you as the Fourteenth abandoned this hall. You had left them, for what abettance could you have offered to a cursed agenda bent on the ruination of your brethren? You left to find another way, even if it meant that the price was to be their lives in spite of everything. 

You left _him_ despite the war in your mind. The voices that screamed for you to stay, if only just _for_ him. Within those last moments, when you saw him walking amongst the dead to reach you, all you wished for was to make it stop. When he finally held you, all you wished for was to have him back. It was damaged and rendered useless, though that mattered so little in the face of death. You would have it all, take him and forget aught else. 

Those had been the thoughts streaming through your head in the end, just before you broke away and became shattered by Her. You remember that torture, the love that had swallowed you whole but was not great enough to save the both of you. 

Now, he is here doing much the same.

“What is behind the door?” 

Your voice echoes barely amid the vast stretch of space, chin turning over your shoulder to behold Hades standing still at the threshold and a good distance afar. He does not move.

“The final days,” he says quietly, and you can hear it too sharply. The fall of his breath at your neck as he speaks, just as sure as he is at your side. “Shall I show you, or do you remember?”

You snap your chin forward again and he is there in flesh, eliciting a shallow gasp from your throat as he slides his heated touch low over your hips.

The doors, enormous and braided with gold and platinum, they break open to a seething inferno. Gales of red-hot flames curl and flare, the temperature rising to an apex within the hall—so visceral you feel as a corpse thrown to the pyre. There is an inexplicable pull of your being on down to the soul, sharp talons hooking into the deepest reaches. Dread coils in your stomach and you understand that you _know_ what waits behind the threshold. 

“You told me that you created this to help me to remember. You’ve done all of this for me. And you saved my life.” Your lips move but what is said becomes lost to your ears, lost to the fire. 

The shadows pull over the contours of his face, cast from the fiery refulgence set by the blaze. In this light, with eyes aglow and set hard on you, he looks very much like your villain. Though that could not be further from the case… This is what you tell yourself.

“What else have you done, Hades?” you whisper, hands reaching upward to pass over and rest along his smooth ashen skin, over the curve of his jaw. “Tell me what you have done.”

Your eyes only search his but for a moment before he responds. “If what you are asking me is if I had a hand in Vauthry’s death, then yes. He was _nothing_ , a waste of space. I did it for you, and I would do it again.”

His tone makes your form shiver even with the smothering heat rushing forth over your flesh. Then something softens in his expression—his eyes like twin embers sweeping over your face. “Vauthry was a threat to your life, created by my hand long ago after the Flood. To usher Light into the First and bring about the next rejoining.” 

At that moment, as your brain processes what he has said, your hands fall away from Hades. 

“I did not foresee our paths crossing in such a manner, that we would be pitted against one another…” His words trail off, then he shakes his head in a most mortal gesture of frustration and self-condemnation. “So _foolish_. Of course, I should have known it would be the case.” 

Heat is searing into your skull, tears welling before you can stop them. “What? Are you saying that…”

Hades appears too calm as he continues, which makes him appear all the more far gone and disjointed. “I have strayed from my purpose, from my god… for I could not bear to have you taken from me yet again.” His fingers are wound in your hair, voice withered to little more than a whisper.

“‘Twould be remiss of me to not confess that my actions had been startling, all the way until the final moment,” he murmurs, then slowly runs one hand down the soft swell of your hip and moves another to hook under your knees. From there, he hitches you into his embrace and your chest is pressed flush against him, arms wrapped over broad shoulders. The roughened manner in which he holds your body makes you feel more like a war trophy than aught else. Shamed as you are to admit—it excites you. Ribbons of dark aether spawn as he begins carrying you through the void. Any word of protest dies in your throat before you can open your mouth, so swift his movements are that all you can do is pitifully whimper and nestle into him from the chill. 

Where you enter makes your limbs nearly stumble into a heap on the floor, as he sets you down.

“Seven hells, Hades…” 

With utmost care, you step into the illusion before you, so sure that it will blow away to naught if you but breathe too harshly. 

A large bedchamber, spread in crimson and mahogany. Rows of bookshelves line one side of the wall opposite from the bed, outfitted with a fragile writing desk littered with spare books and sundry papers. There is a marbled fireplace that sits to the right of the room, with an ornate loveseat situated in front. A painter’s easel sits near a sweep of latticed windows, offset into a spacious oriel. A throng of plants are scattered along the windows, ferns and flowers alike. Tiny threads of vines cling along the windows, beset with flowers of soft lilac. Stacks of abandoned canvases lean against the far wall. The flooring is a rich and dark marble, mostly obscured by the plushest rug that the greater part of your shoe sinks into as you tread towards the bed unthinking. Matching night tables flank the broad expanse of silken white bedding, adorned by a high headboard with delicate carvings etched into polished wood. The entire space exudes a staggering measure of warmth.

Gently you run your fingertips over the fine sheets, all whilst gazing outside one of the tall windows. Amaurot is spread before your toes, glittering spires rising from below and breaching the dead air of night. 

“None of this makes any sense.” 

The sound trembles from your lips with disconnect, vision blurring with the glare along the glass. You want to ask him how any of this is possible. You want to ask...

_Are you no longer tempered?_

...but you are too afraid to. 

You are afraid for him, for yourself, for how merely placing speech to the words will make everything crumble away to naught. It feels too fragile as it is. You want to hold it, cherish it, _love_ it. 

Your eyelids fall heavy when warm hands come to rest along your shoulders, circling over the bones and sliding smooth to the collar of your robes. The muscles beneath your heated flesh stiffen by just a fraction, though your pulse climbs uncontrollably. There is no thought of stopping Hades as he unhurriedly unties and works the garment off of your body. The sable fabric spills away and pools onto the floor at your feet, with little regard. 

Instead of asking what you _should_ ask, a notion falls upon your cognizance that you had not thought of for all this time.

“Tell me, Hades.” It hushes from your breath as you feel his lips press against the bare skin along the curve of your shoulder. “What was..." Everything slips out of focus for a split second. "... _is_ my name?” 

Hades stills the hands that have been searching over your stomach and hips, covered by little more than a strip of thin cloth. The heat from his body is draped over your back, the wet drag of his lips and tongue pulling over your throat, sharp teeth scraping a path to your ear. 

And then you hear his whisper, the ancient bend of fractured bells and echoes from a long dead language. Before you had run from it. Now you bid it to caress you, an understanding borne from soul. 

“Persephone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone for reading, dropping kudos and comments, bookmarks/subs!! The next chapter... hmm. We know where this is headed... ;)


	10. to return

“ _Persephone._ ”

You hear your name the first time from his lips, and it is much like your tired feet are tripping, stumbling upon some sort of hallowed ground. Another step back into the past that was stripped and stolen. An _entire_ existence blotted out into naught—hearkened back from a time when you never could have fathomed how you, a sad thing adrift in the wilds, would become swallowed by a glinted city of masks. Thrust by _his_ side. His heart and his mind, his _soul_ bent to you. It had been a mad whirlwind of a love story, toppled over by a mountain of collapsed dreams and promises—cooked down to ash by fear, only to have you forged into a nonpareil tool for the failing star.

So something inside both **_breaks_** and clicks into place when Hades opens his mouth, quiet and crippling to your limbs. Perhaps if someone else had told you, and not in that sweet and fallen language, you would not have been so affected.

But once it bends from his tongue, the name shatters you even as he holds fast to the pieces. A strange sound that is whispered—a _song_. It soaks into skin and blood, cleaves through bone into the sponge of marrow. It sinks still deeper, steeped within your aether as it fans a spectral shadow over the span of your soul, drifting into the mind as an echo. 

A sharp stab splits into the base of your skull. You lurch forward and can hear Hades’s muted voice from behind, though it is impossible to decipher what is said. The pain is there but it is different this time, the sensation as it tangles into your head—the _warmth_ of it.

Gentle drifts of darkness wrap and wall you in from all sides, while your psyche tumbles down into a freefall—

_\--the flash of your smile in a meadow flush with flowers..._

_the dip of your shoulder to soft music below the still gloaming..._

_the rush of broken breath spread ‘neath the glow of candlelight..._

A tremor ripples along your senses and snaps you back to the present. 

_Myself... reflected from his eyes..._

Though she was not you, it had been like looking in a mirror just the same.

Vision blurred black, you blink furiously to gain back some measure of focus and are struck with how impossibly high the ceiling is from above. Its reach is comparable to the many other spaces you had delved into within this dislimned dream of a home long forgotten. Though here, curls of shimmering opal weave within the onyx that varnishes over the vaulted plafond, sparkling as streams of starlight. Like the sky has been prised open, stretching into the dark beyond. 

Hades grasps you powerfully around the waist and the distress feeding off from him is made plain by how tense he feels against you, in both flesh and something else you only now have the presence of mind to wrestle—something about his aether. It rolls off of him in crushing waves, a myriad of emotions that you can barely pick through for all the turbulence cascading from his touch, shaded and without name.

“Are you all right? Talk to me...” His voice is roughened with feeling, prompting you to absently press more into him. The sharp gasp you snatch from his chest, paired with the firmness bearing down at the small of your back, it lands you straight on your feet.

With the greatest of efforts do you try to ignore the stark heat you feel under your skin, fingernails cutting fiercely into Hades’s arms as your mind is hunting—scouring to spark the synapses and seize those memories back, flashed radiant like jewels. To see yet more and gather them close.

You beseech him despite the fever ripping itself through your veins, despite not knowing what it is you are asking for. The plea strings itself together, dangling from your lips but nothing rises from your throat. Still, Hades answers with your name, lips shaping the sound into the nape of your neck, and it feels right, so very ordinary to hear him speak it. 

“Persephone...”

His breath burns on your skin yet floods through as cool water poured over smouldering ash, upon the last vestiges of Light that still squeeze to your soul. And it embraces in the same beat that it shakes you, a soft prayer lilted slow and stitching your spine straight to its word.

_“...My wife..._ ”

Your eyes sting and you’ve lost your tongue, anything you would have thought to say has been drowned elsewhere.

And then a tiny trail of words follows the haunting melody that flows from your lover’s lips—a thinned voice unspoken that slips past every wall and every chain to clutch a part of you that has long since been secreted. A voice unheard, but felt. You do not understand, _could not understand_ until it brushes past with the most familiar softness, a caress like no other. Naught that flesh would know, but an untold covenant that neither time nor death could drag down by its claws.

_...open your soul to me..._

You quickly spin around in his arms. The touch of his fingertips sweeps across your skin as your half-lidded eyes lift to meet his. Blood is bubbling, nigh roaring in your ears. Never have you felt so raw and yet so _full_ under his open gaze—a gaze that filters through, transcending the corporeal. It does not escape you that he appears much the same. You can see him, his soul. The colour flares so intense, a tempest of crimson fevered to a pitch that matches the storm of his aether. A wordless question spirals in your mind, flitting and dancing until he catches it.

“I need you, Seph...” Hades tells you, quiet and shed of all pretense. Your fingers are twisted into lustrous hair, twirling the shock of white and _oh, how you have fallen_ —you'd deliver the moon and every star unto him, strewn from the skies and stacked at his feet if he'd but ask.

Practiced and patient hands run up along your spine and down low at your hips. You vaguely wonder if there are more than just two when, at the same time, a finger hooks under your chin to tilt it back and his mouth dapples a burning trail of tongue and teeth down your throat. As he reaches the shallow curve of collarbone, he presses an unrushed kiss. Taking borrowed time to breathe you in, a long pause to relish in your scent before dragging his mouth up north again. Slowly tracing the tip of his nose back up along your neck with sultry breath blooming in tow. Beneath low lashes, you can see how his eyes sparkle like two chips of dark citrine. And a cool and light feathering sensation grazes over your body, pulling against your limbs and further into him... his aether, mingling and soothing while it wends across your own, which now feels as hot as when it was set aflame with the Light of Norvrandt. Your arms cling on to him as a lifeline, for he makes you feel safe. 

“Offer yourself to me," he says. "Let me have you and I shall regale you with how we used to spend our time in this old room... when you could not see where I ended and you began.” It is said with a lick of edge, drawn out in a low and hushed timbre. Your thighs press and slide together without realising. “Let me feel you, hear you, taste you...” He brushes his mouth over yours, as you suck in a quickened sigh. His hands rest at your waist with glaring restraint. “Bend you back and make you mine again...”

There is a plea within the demand, a token of doubt that is needless. Every part of you, both small and large, has been spread for his personal perusal. He knows how willing you are; he makes you forget yourself by making you remember with every glance from his eyes, every press of his fingers, every kiss to your skin. He _owns_ you. Even so, a certain measure of hesitation paints his features with brow furrowed and jaw clenched. 

His voice is soft, though does not waver. “Do you trust me?”

The intent is made plain, as his soul strokes faint against your own into a resurged touch and pull you have yet to fully understand. He will teach you, all in due time. 

“Yes, I trust you...” Your reply comes to him unbound, the need spilling itself out into what your essence already sings. “ _Please, Hades..._ ” 

Pushing your heated face to the cool, fine drape of fabric over his shoulder, you are blazing as gentle and warm hands feather up along your form. They come to cup over your cheek, lifting your eyes to his.

“Pardon? Please _what_?” There is a note of mischief in his tone.

_Oh Gods..._

Hades studies your lips as the words rush out unbidden. “Please take me. You know I’m yours...”

His smile is a thing both lovely and wicked, and it sets something free from the inside. Then he grazes his lips across your jaw with a low hum of approval. “Very good.” 

He kisses you, and it is too fragile. Too shiftless and slow, to the way his next demand makes you quake. 

“Lie down on the bed, my dear. On your back.”

Your nails nigh break the skin of your palms, trying so very hard to not look like the part of the wide-eyed doe to the wolf. 

The backs of your knees hit the fall of the bed, your strength buckling to its lofty and rich touch. Hades urges you to relax, bids you to breathe and take your time. You do as you are told, ignoring the tight hitch in your chest and the fact that you have failed to kick off your damned shoes. 

As your back presses to cool silk, a crisp snap cracks in the air and the whole of the room darkens. Candles spring to life in stray, scattered corners of shadow. The slip of clothing that once shrouded you, gone with any second thoughts flying through your head as you lay unwrapped and short-winded before him against the pristine white of the sheets. Only sheer black pantalettes and stockings remain. He has made quick work of the footwear for you.

Eyes flitting down to take in your state of dress, you cannot hope to hide the blush creeping fast up your neck. It has been so long since you’ve been with another, before the revolution of Ala Mhigo and before the Exarch began plucking apart your vague concept of reality on the Source. Naught but trysts, insignificant encounters to while your time and ease the burden of throwing your life at the populace. 

_Nothing like..._

As you look back up at Hades, you may as well be a virgin under his crushing scrutiny. He most certainly makes you feel like one, throat going parched as he rolls his own robes off the shoulder to reveal a fitted button down and sleek slacks. Their deep colour makes his pale flesh glow in the warm light. His darkened eyes hold so very heavy on you, the glitter of gold in the shadows cast by the flicker of flame—roaming over your body as you lay propped against a heap of lush pillows, one knee bending back as if to help eclipse your unveiled skin. 

He slowly works his shirt loose at the collar, freeing the first few buttons and you know he is doing this for your benefit. With nary an effort, he could snap his fingers and leave himself bare, ravish you senseless and you would welcome him with open arms. But he is of no mind to do so, gathering up his sleeves to the elbow and stepping closer with a ghost of a smile turning on his pretty lips. He knows you truly wish for seduction; he does not need to read your soul to gather this. It is written in your weary gaze and you should want for nothing. 

So with care does he settle down at the edge of the bed beside you, stretching one long arm to brace over your legs. And to your bent knee, against the smooth black of the stockings but with the heat of his mouth felt keen, he places a languid kiss. He does this while bringing a hand to your outer thigh, skimming the back of it along the supple skin exposed and skirting just beyond the reach of fine spun fabric. Tracing over the hem, softly with his thumb. Meeting you full in the eye with his plush pout catching over your flesh. 

"Spread your legs for me."

_Oh dear sweet Twelve above..._

How _very_ embarrassing. You had not realised that you were clenching your legs so tight, and his sharp command paired with his shameless stare, it leaves you splitting open your thighs with a low unchecked moan. A chill drifts in between, just as fingers coil around the back of your calve and Hades pulls you close, easing into you with unhurried motion. He prowls over your form, hands hooking at the back of your knees as if to stretch you further apart for him and you can feel his cooled aether working up your body along with his feverish touch. Trailing up your limbs and teasing ever so, felt edged like needle-tipped claws. Splicing into your aether, tangling with misplaced warmth. 

“My, my... You are shaking like a leaf.” Hades states this with a hint of a predatory smirk, made crooked as he leans his head down to your navel to lazily run his wet tongue over a stray mole that resides just north. The earring dangling from his ear only divides your attention by a small fraction, catching the ambient glimmer of candle as he tastes your skin. He is certainly not wrong in this. You are shivering so much that it is painfully visible. 

Your hands are wringing into the fine weave of silk at your sides when he drags a searing stripe up along the comb of your ribcage, all the long way to your left breast. His tongue curls at the contact of peaked skin, lifting away to plague your resolve. He cannot suppress the subdued chuckle under his breath as you scoff indignantly at him, nibbling your lip when you feel his aether ghost around your inner thighs in torpid fashion. Tickling and no doubt avoiding where you want it the most.

His teasing quickly serves to ignite you.

“Just breathe,” he instructs, before tipping his mouth down to yours. And with how thin your resolve has become, you meet Hades halfway—teeth snagging at his pout before gathering him into a heated kiss. The deep, gravelled growl you tug from his throat makes you lose all concept of control, fingers reaching for purchase into soft burgundy locks to pull him closer while one leg twists over his hip in an endeavor to topple him down, to feel the hard press of his body. 

To your considerable surprise, Hades allows you as much. One hand firmly plants itself gripped along the thigh that is currently flung around him, and the other hand is buried in your hair as he returns your kiss with mounting vigour. You can feel his need for you, the telling pressure rubbed over the scant bits of woven thread that bind your skin from his. Though it is a tad off the mark, a touch too far to hit that place you so crave. So you roll your hips into Hades as you roll your tongue over his, and drag your dampened apex over stiffened flesh. The gutteral sounds you drive from him are intoxicating and all too encouraging. 

But then something snaps harsh within his aether, a pulsing charge that stings and makes you falter from the pain, and your smallish shriek is swallowed by his mouth. Like static energy, felt straight down to the bone though not entirely unpleasurable. He breaks the kiss and you open your eyes only to become trapped by his gaze—glacial gold thinning to black pupils blown wide, like the winter sun setting to the long dark of night. 

“You are so beautiful.” It slips from the tongue before you can stop it, breathless and free. 

The smile Hades returns is staggering, something beyond compare and corrupt all the same. There is a shift to the shadows, swathed over the fine angles of his profile by candlelight. An inexplicable pull in the quiet as his darkened aether swells and traces through you, _into_ you so as to snag. It rips a gasp from your chest, ice crackling against the hot burn of your essence. 

“Whha—” Your question is clipped off, cut down by a chaste kiss. The sudden smell of cedar and spices, lingering notes of lavender and bergamot twined within, it drifts over and slackens every muscle. Such a familiarity, as if you had never forgotten but merely neglected to take the time to notice. 

“Shhh, my love. Give in and let me take care of you.”

He lowers his mouth to your chin and then along your jawline, at first a light feathery feeling juxtaposed to the raw dynamic of his aether and something else you’ve yet to understand. Though as his tongue and teeth run down your throat, his touch grows more intense with need—nipping and sucking a bruising path down to the collarbone. With care, he balances the sparks of fire spread from his lips by creating yet more with his fingers. The hand in your hair trails past to join the other and begins teasing you in a gentle dance, drawing listless patterns to and fro over the stretch of your ribs. Just beneath the curve of your breasts, glancing over skin that crawls with fever. It is frustrating and arousing in turns, the smooth and uncalloused pads of his fingers brushing up each dip of each bone, up to the rounded swell of tender flesh only to sink his hands down again. 

You want to feel his soft skin against yours, so you slip your hands down the collar of his shirt as his teeth score back up along the long slope of your neck. Slowly you drag your nails down his nape from shaven hair, drawing the smallest sigh of approval from his breath, to then trace them carefully around the muscles of his shoulders and along the fine dip of bone. His mouth drifts over yours, barely touching as your hands wrench over the fabric to rip it to ruin, yet the snap of his fingers reduces the loathsome shirt into motes of darkness. And then his lips capture yours into a tender touch, tongue brushing sweet and loving in motions which render your strength trammeled. The feel of his warm flesh, the ripple of lean brawn flexing and pulling just beneath, it leaves you a pure mess and the proof is felt so acutely between your legs as your fingers dig into his scalp yet again, losing yourself to his kiss. He breaks away much too soon, a moan more akin to a whine leaving your throat when he slinks down your body with a curious glint in his eye.

His intimacy is like no other you have lain with. Warriors with roughened skin worn by battle, grasping you with all the tenderness of a whore—it once had its charms, yes. Though no one has ever really cared to consider your needs and desires, to put you before their own. Hades does just that, and with such reverence to make your heart rise to your throat. And his play and his games—they make it all the better. You should fear that he will break and scatter you into dust, but such thoughts are for naught. 

The cool lick of his aether sweeps up over your splayed thighs and flows down your shoulders, combing along the ache of muscle in your arms down to your wrists. When it arrives at your hands, still nestled within silken locks, there is a tug that you find yourself submitting to. A peculiar energy braiding through your fingers and pulling your wrists above your head. Not seen but felt so visceral as it pushes you back and threads into the webbing like hands pinning you back, all while Hades works his hot mouth down your heaving sternum.

For a brief moment, a dull instinct strikes to fight back against the bindings, some extension of his essence or magicks that your body is not quite sure of. You open your mouth to protest but what comes out is more of a sapped cry as the aether winding along your thighs shifts to stroke brutal over your aching sex, shooting a frisson of heat down your lower half. Your hips inadvertently buck into what feels like nothing—to then breach the short distance into a firm plane of abdomen. It is quite difficult to not grind into the solidness there, lean muscle strained and tensed over your sensitive, most delicate parts. Casting your heavy eyes downward, they are swift to lock onto the scene below—the subtle, depraved grin Hades offers while his large hands drift up to cup and grasp over your breasts in full, watching with fixation as you throw your neck back when his thumbs _push_ and flick hard over pert peaks. It sends you gasping, and your hips helplessly drive into him with the motion. The wet pull of your smallclothes against his taut stomach makes you blush furiously. 

“Ah, so _very_ ready for me and I’ve barely touched...” Hades purrs while ghosting his mouth over your flushed skin, dipping his tongue to swirl around a pebbled nipple before wrapping lush lips to suck very slow. Savoring in your taste, rolling the bud ‘twixt his teeth and pulling deliciously with just enough bite. He has a drunken look painted on his face all while doing so. 

You find yourself echoing him, encouraging him with breathy purrs of your own. The man is smug as ever but you do not care as he hums into your breast, fingers gentle in pinching and twisting at its twin. It feels too good and he is making you soak for him. Your eyes fall shut as you wedge your bottom lip between clamped teeth, tense biceps quivering and nails squeezing into the darksome aetherial fetters laced through. Its cold bite yields ever so with soft sighs blowing from his breath, and you understand that it is something you needn't fight against. Rather, you hold on as an anchor while crumbling under this _evil_ Ascian. And with every tug and stroke of your hand on his aether, you win small battles in hearing him come undone. 

His mouth on you is thorough and wasting, bent solely on your pleasure while his velvet tongue draws lazy letters and secret scrawls of unspoken words and promises only fools would make. When you become too relaxed, he brings you back with pointed teeth. Dragging their edge from your breast to your ribs, watching you hiss and then coo when he soothes a slickened path over with silken lips and tongue. All the while, his nimble hands stroke across your skin, kneading into the tense muscle of your hips and thighs—readying you yet more, spreading you out into something wanton.

Hades spends long moments pressing honeyed whispers of praise and worship into your flesh, how perfect you are—your soul so exquisite and heaven incarnate—in his hands _at last_. You feel something opening inside to his touch, his words, his essence—unfurling just for him like plush petals to the sun. His mouth dallies down your stomach, along shivering skin to trace his lips over unsung scars of eld and his aether wraps around you with sudden warmth, something he pulls from you—from your soul, coalescing and suffusing with your light. 

“How long I have waited for this, to touch you,” he hushes, kissing imperfect flesh with dizzying affection. His breath feathers hot down your navel in between the fevered pass of his lips, fanning fire all the way to the seam of your smallclothes while his knuckles rake down your back, tight muscle yielding below and bringing you to arch into him with shaking limbs parting more wide. Sensing your anxiety, he smooths his fingers down your ass, coming to grasp and steady your trembling thighs as he sinks down further until settled in comfortably between. 

Your breathing grows shallow and uneven while Hades leans his face close, so very close to your sex, bound by sodden and sheer material. In earnest you hold onto the profound warmth of aether at your fingers, quite ashamed for how affected you are. As you look down upon him, the pale glow of his eyes pins you in place as some stray stands of frosted hair fall over his brow. 

"...to taste you..." 

You can feel the heat of his mouth when he speaks, all before he acts on his word. Hades pulls his tongue flat over the fabric, dragging it from the drenched area at your center and spanning upward to the budding of nerves swollen from neglect. From there, he swirls only the tip of his tongue, soaking the knit yet more and driving a guttural groan from deep in your chest. The touch is barely muted for how thin the weave, but just enough to leave you _begging_ for more friction.

“ _Gods_ , Hades. _Plea_ —”

Your knees inadvertently attempt to shut tight as your back bows to the sensation, choking on air and jerking your shoulders at the bindings when Hades circles his lips along that bud and suckles slowly, with such leisure. He presses your thighs back, spreading you out while he drifts his tongue across the throb there, flicking at its pulse and you are seeing the stars swarm in your eyes. 

If his mouth on you is not enough, Hades sends his aether to run over your sweating skin—stroking and brushing along your breasts, stomach, and backside. Looping and pulling sweetly, teasing at your hardened nipples in time with his tongue lapping at your core, soaked in equal parts saliva and need. Your hips rut upward as much as they are allowed under his hands, joints becoming sore for how flat your thighs are splayed to the bedding. 

And it becomes quickly evident that the touch is _not_ enough, for you are empty—clenching onto nothing, and the damned pantalettes are still in the way of smooth, wet muscle. Hades must agree with you, as something churns in the space between just before he snaps a finger, leaving your bare skin chilled for a split second before wet heat swells at your sex in full and its intensity shreds a loud cry from you. He quietly moans as he nudges his nose and rolls his tongue along without relent, with broad passes through tender folds to lick at your center, tasting and relishing in you while you chant his name into the shadows. His arms are hooked strongly around your limbs now, holding you close and you want nothing more than to pull at his hair, bring him to kiss you for how he is trapping you into a heady stare—his golden eyes equally snared by your flushed cheeks and whorls of tousled hair strewn to the pillows. The grip is fierce against the phantom pull pinning you back, your body writhing for still more contact but your mind not granting you the humility to admit to such. 

“Ah, you poor thing,” he murmurs into your flesh, deepened timbre lilting in jest and lids falling heavy from your nails scoring into his aether. “If you but ask, I will concede.” His tongue rims around your aching entrance, lazily and you can see the lecherous smile in his eyes as he does so. It sends you panting, face burning hot as you feel you have been set in motion to fail. 

“Do go on. Indulge me. Tell me what you want, hero.”

Hades lets one hand fall down your inner thigh, the smooth bed of his dull nails sweeping down supple skin to carefully knead along the muscle at the juncture of your sex. You are seeping all over the white silk of the sheets. It is felt keen while he kisses your petals, only with lush and red, glistening lips in a maddening gesture to make you stoop to profanity. 

“Damn it, _please_ Hades! Use your fingers on me, fuck me— _oh!"_

Your plea is interrupted by his touch. With little ceremony, he slips his middle finger inside of your slick, crooking it just so to make you lurch and buck into his hand. You shudder at the contact, thighs tensing as your core squeezes around his digit all while he begins to rub unerringly along the most tender reaches within. Hades parts his mouth open with heated interest and, for how willing you are, it is naught for him to add two more to join the other—watching you cry and break under the feel of him, the sweet stretch he spreads. He splits you wide against his fingers, thrusting deep once—twice before gathering your wetted flesh between his lips and supping on you like a man starved. It is impossible for your hips not to meet Hades in the middle with every bend and pump of his hand, throwing your head back and rutting against him unrestrained. His tongue drags and laves thickly over your folds, sweeping to then flutter at the pulsing bud and faintly scrape teeth while you set your clouded gaze upon him from under your nose. He keeps his golden eyes trained on you, to study your every reaction and the debauched look of him between your legs makes your skin combust. 

Warmed aether, still suffused with your essence, now spans over your body and teems with a force that knots itself tight in your chest. He only pulls his mouth away long enough to coax you on, pushing soft kisses into your thighs and then peppering them over your pubic bone—soothing his free hand along your ribs to your breasts to massage with fondness. The sounds that flood the dark of the room are lewd, intoxicating to the ear and the dimming glow of the surrounding candles makes the whole affair feel fogged, as if from a dream to become lost.

It is passing strange how your fingers ended up sifting into his silky tresses, body curled close from underneath and cooing plush words of admiration to Hades whilst hitting your first of many highs under his skilled care. You do not know when the aether coiled around your wrists began to ebb; you are so swept up in him that you lack the focus. And he is far too wrapped in you to care for his teasing, his mouth and fingers working you into a tireless crescendo. 

“ _Yes_ , right there. Like that...”

You can barely choke the words out in a breathless rush, both hearing and feeling him moan deeply into your sex in reply. Just as he tips you to the edge, he suckles hard onto your clit whilst swirling his tongue ‘round slow, the hooked fingers stroking inside you in tune with his mouth. Your hands wrench at his hair to somehow press him closer as you fall apart, howling his name as you finally come for him and he is quick to drink you down, digits pulling from your trembling walls so that he can run his tongue through your sopping folds, stroking long stripes to catch every drop you spill. Your vision is swimming in a kaleidoscope of colour, stars bursting beneath your eyelids as you shatter under his mouth, sobbing from its intensity. He needs to firmly hold your hips down as you shudder and squirm around him, singing praise into your sensitive flesh of how well you have done, how radiant you are as you come to pieces just for him. There is a mix of both awe and ardor branded into his eyes, long lashes hung low with lust.

“If only you could see how simply _divine_ you are, my love. Your soul is the most enchanting thing I have ever laid eyes on,” Hades rasps onto burning skin, grasping your waist and roughly dragging you against the smooth, dampened silk to pin you beneath him. 

A hiss is pressed from your teeth, followed by a hoarse sigh when you realise that there lie no boundary between. It is lost on you as to what time he divested himself of the rest of his clothing and you are set on fire as his stiff length slides over your slick, still so very tender and raw. His stare meets yours, steeped in deep shadow though it is difficult to miss the hunger there. He takes care not to crush you under his weight and yet the warmth of his body is flush enough that you can feel his chest expand powerfully along yours. Despite it being hard to breathe, you still crave for him to be more close. So your limbs tangle around his hips in an effort to tumble him into you, arms curling around to drag nails down the broad planes of his shoulders. He yields enough to pluck a throaty moan from down deep.

“You’ve never told me. What is the colour of my soul?” This is embarrassingly mumbled out when he brings fingertips to graze over your hairline, caressing your cheek before lacing into your locks and brushing his lips gently over yours. 

“Blue.” 

He whispers his answer against your mouth, and you feel the sharp hitch in his abdomen as you pivot your hips and rut yourself along his solid erection. His tongue runs over your pout, and then pulls you into a feverish kiss, the taste of yourself passed from his lips and rendering you weak. Your legs spread more wide from under him and, with little preamble and as if your bodies had twined like such for so many times before, Hades drives his cock slow and with ease inside of you. 

His groan is deep and tremors across your lips, and you wonder if it is only you shivering in the darkness. The feel of him is surreal and surely you have stepped into heaven, you think this with certainty as he smothers your gasps whilst your skin, your aether, and your soul surrounds him with light. It comes crashing down sweetly when he bottoms out deep inside, spine arched while his mouth still has you snared by his kiss. He does not draw back so soon. The stretch and the fullness of him nestled within is a sensation more extraordinary than words could express. You’d already forgotten what had been said just the moment before when Hades pulls from your lips as he pulls from your sex, leaving you nigh empty until steadily pressing back into you as he regales you with pretty words etched in longing.

“Ah but my sweet angel, it is sadly not a blue that you have ever seen in this lifetime...” The rhythm of his speech is as smooth as his thrusts, sure and purposeful although the broken need you sense is just brimming at the surface. It feeds off from his aether that now cocoons from around with still more warmth, in the wisps of strangled breath that slip between each syllable spoken, in the tense grip of his fingers now threaded with your own. He is just as affected as you, who are now fast becoming a sweating mess. He nuzzles his mouth into the dip of your shoulder, burying his face in your hair at your ear. You cling to him, completely lost in his voice and touch. “It is the same blue from the seas of eld. The vast waters that stretched beyond the land that we called home. And it forever changes with your emotions, just as so many elements shape the depths of an ocean.”

His tongue traces along your ear as he speaks, and the fingers that were once twined in your grasp are now stroking over your flushing flesh—slowly picking up with a heat that betrays the measured charge of his hips against yours. While squeezing your ass and thighs in one moment, they are groping and pinching possessively over your breasts at the next, then again somewhere in between. Through it all, his hands leave searing trails across your body that make you feel as though you are splitting apart in their wake. 

“The times that you are sedate and resolved, as when you are in battle...” he murmurs at your throat, sucking fine skin between sharp teeth. You whimper when he pulls away to look in your eyes. “Your soul shines of azure, a colour akin to the waters that drift from the shallows of Lakeland. Pure and sublime... _inspiring_.” 

Hades leans in to kiss you softly for a long moment, driving himself deep inside of you to where your nails draw blood from his back. When he breaks his lips from yours, he breaks entirely from the embrace—leaving you aching and gasping with need in the short span of time it takes for him to flip you at your side, faced from him and anxious until he gathers you close and back plush to his chest. He feathers his fingers down your curled spine and naturally you buck into him as he enters you in earnest, hitting an angle that tugs a choking cry from your lungs. One hand claws strong at your hip, as another deftly sweeps the tangle of hair away from your neck. You turn your head for your lips to be claimed harsh by his biting touch, the next words pressed there and keen. 

“And when you are dispirited and heartache plagues you, as I observed in the Greatwood... or when I offered to ease the burden of your memories...” His gold eyes imprison you just as soon as your leaden lids drift open from what is said, head falling back along his bicep swept from around. He sinks a hand down between your thighs, where his length is sheathed full within and he rolls his hips so unrushed to your rising pleasure. A thumb swipes lazily at your clitoris and you swoon at the feel, muscles squeezing down hard and arching your hips further into him. He shudders, baring his teeth at your shoulder as he picks up the pace, though more erratic now. You can feel the skin break, a sharp and gratifying pain washing over, and quickly you lace your fingers through the hand between your legs as you grind yourself into him. His name is tattooed on your tongue, low and languishing as a litany while he continues in kind. "Your soul is deep sapphire, as one would expect in the deepest of trenches... within an abyss split into the sea.” He hushes the rest of his words out, and you know that you will come merely from watching him falter. 

On a whim, you decide to take the reins. Though it proves difficult, given how close you are, you tear yourself from him—and that is exactly what it feels like when you stagger into the sheets from it. Like something rips from the inside, within your aether and some place more vast that takes all your breath. Hades links a hold at your wrist and moves to pull you back into his arms, but your other hand stays him. You shake your chin, vision taking in his most sinful state. Frosted wine hair in chaos from your romp, flushed lithe muscles sheening with sweat, bruised and swollen lips wet with your blood, erection bobbing lewd and slicked with your need—you find you cannot suppress the soft moan of approval as you splay your fingers at his chest and press him back onto the bed.

You crawl over his body to straddle him proper. The gentle stroke of his hands at your waist as you bear down upon him elicits you to chew hard at your bottom lip in anticipation. He watches you intently, with fascination and something of a growl breaks from his throat as you grasp him at the base to ease yourself onto him. His pupils grow so deep and wide until all you see are thinned bands of gold, dark and hung on your every move. Though perhaps you had been a bit hasty, for you feel dazed and weak all the sudden, the sensation of his throbbing length spearing you in two with this position for how sensitive you've become. He is pulling you apart but you cannot stop it, do not want to stop it as he spreads you thin and trembling. A shadow of a smirk toys at one corner of his mouth, hinting to you that he knows of your vulnerable condition but still you press on nevertheless. 

“Tell me, Hades.” Your fingers tangle with his as you rock your weight into him, pivoting your pelvis just so and leaning back to where he hits the mark. “What of my soul when I--... I am happy?” You wish the words had come more fluid. Instead, they are ran ragged by your heavy panting. 

His lips twitch softly to the question, parting open into a broad and charming grin before tugging you down to fall into the warmth of his chest. He meets you with his mouth, a velvety rich kiss that drives you still weaker and you can feel him already taking over again. One of his hands gathers at your waist, pulling you down roughly against his cock as he undulates his hips from beneath. The feel of him carved so deep into your cervix, it makes you shake uncontrollable around him as he holds fast to the back of your neck, fingers woven into your hair. For one long moment, he works your soaking heat along him while he gazes at you with a shine to his golden eyes. A shine that makes you feel as though he would shower the very stars from the heavens into your open palms like diamonds. He slides his tongue slowly along your neck, nibbling and kissing until he reaches your ear. 

“It is as I see you now. I wish you could see it...” Hades breathes, his voice then swaying into a sweet song of yore. “... _a most mesmerising cerulean blue, plucked from only the finest skies above the sea that once sprawled around Amaurot.”_

As what he says sinks in, his mouth finds yours again and he is curling his abdomen upward, at the same time tucking your knees back to where you are folded around him and straddled in his lap. He moves you against him, stretching and nudging you to the edge and you know what he says is right—so simple and true, you are impossibly happy and free. You kiss him back—desperate, burying your fingers into silken hair, flooding with the need to show him just how elated you are—no matter where this takes you. To show him how much you feel for him, how much you _love_ him with every fibre of your being, this unnamed and endless tether that drags you in as the dark tide. 

... and then something breaks inside yet again, intrinsic and coalesced into the heart of you. 

Your nails cut and claw into Hades as he wraps his arms around, pressing you into his skin and whispering into your lips. “Yes, Persephone. That’s it, _open up for me_.”

You can feel the ache, the snarl of the ribbon binding you as he still fucks you into tears. You come apart, all around him as rain and he _takes_ —

“That’s right, my love... **_Look at me_**.” 

His torn voice opens your eyes. The crisp and ephemeral scent of wildflowers sweeps past, drawn from a lost meadow that burned to dust thousands and thousands of years ago.

A soft smile kisses your lips, and you take yet another step.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah. Finally breached that porn with feelings tag. Sorry for the long wait on this one. Work has honestly killed my time for writing just a bit. The hours have been hellish. I should add that this chapter is most definitely more of a two-parter. I got to 7k words and realized that I should preserve at least some (?) of the pacing XD.. I really hope you guys enjoy and, as always, thank you all so much for the support! 
> 
> p.s. i am in comma prison for sure with this update, i know.. *facepalm*


	11. kairos

Spiderwebs of smoke climb far and unseen from the lapsed glim of candle. There is a grating charge that stems from the darkness, a murmured pulse that lurks—much like the pull of mana, a thick torsion to the air that hugs your lungs.

“Forgive me...”

His words rumble along the flesh of your shoulder and down to the ebb of bone, spoken with a sorrow that purls softly into stillness. Enough to rouse the smallest of muscles into fluttering tension, for your nails to rake firm over the long trail of his spine even as you shrink back just a touch. Your smile fades with his voice, a telling twinge behind the eyes. Some measure of pause ties your tongue because for all the ravel that binds you in place, for each peculiar whorl of colour that cleaves to the incomplete soul flaring from the inside, mapped so intricate in his eyes alone—for all of that, it seems the furthest reaches of your mind already know.

It is a mind bruised, torn and held together with paretic shadows of memory. Lingering whispers from the dead and their gods, reaped over the ages by rivers of crimson spilt for every rejoining—to bring you here to this moment, wrapped so willing in the arms of your prescribed enemy. And it is a confusing thing really, to be struck into a state of limbo—trapped between two halves of self, the firebrand who felled a dying star for rebirth and the disillusioned champion who has safeguarded its remains with naught more than bloodletting and dissociation. Much like you are hung by knotted strings while blindfolded, the toes of your boots scraping at dry glebe until you can scarce remember where your home is—the sundered star you have for so long suffered, or bent across the constellation of what has been cast off by soured fate. The halves are not equal at all with the greater sum of you, the hero you are meant to be, still dashed to the cosmos. 

Such a notion surfaced from darker recesses, it does not help to spare that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Yet as if to fool himself and make you forget, Hades takes your mouth to his with a crippling impatience—sharing in your unsteady breath before his tongue bends to steal it back again. And when he tugs you closer, you mould into unchecked warmth—his heart stutters at your breast, and you cannot tell whose is beating faster. You fold into him with a sigh, praying you could live there. Just sewn somewhere along his skin until the stars go out and there are no more left to save. Tears spill into his kiss and leave behind silent reveries of whether he can taste the colour of your shame, or if it stains the soul into something less becoming—though you’d never know for as fixated, how _enthralled_ he seems.

There is disorder in his embrace around your form, in how his aether curls and crackles with rising pressure, closing in and rendering you wasted, steadily deboning each limb to his liking and drying your eyes fast in the wake of its path. In how there is an odd yet familiar ache from his touch that speaks of _more_. The pervasive scent of vernal ozone, of newly turned loam and petrichor—it exhales into the umbral reaches of the chamber. For a moment, you muse on whether he has magicked you away to a lonely vale, or perhaps a lorn oasis of hanging gardens—tucked and yellowed within the scrawling verses of a fable that you’d known as a child. It would be much too prosaic to blame only the foliage that tumbles about the tall windows from afar, billowing vines and dusky blooms mingling as serpents along the glass or otherwise.

Your fingers twitch as they reach to frame his face, to cradle every fine cut and hollow as you pull away, straining in futility to read his expression. All you gather is the ebon shade of a man bathed in shadow, as the steady fall of his breath blows softly into your palm when he nudges a smooth cheek there, pressing a long kiss that leaves you both haunted. He is slow in running his hands over the curve of your waist, shaping the pads of his thumbs into the muscles and bones beneath, inscribing with his touch an evocation of a more simple time when entire days were missed to the friction of his body against yours. You cannot see the fair spangle of sun from his eyes but feel that he is staring into you more mournful than ever before. 

“Why?” you ask finally and not without the scant slip of edge, “What is there to forgive?” 

His lips trek across the inside of your wrist, charting the spidery contour of veins and writhen scars while arranging you more comfortable on his lap. Your head tips back, hands coming to rest at the ridge of his collarbone, deliberate in massaging at the lean sinew that roils just below your knuckles as his hips rise to join yours. The unspoken tension now churns about his aether as a lure, a harsh snare into a different type of synergy, coaxing you forth with the untamed power of a painful grasp on your pelvis as he slams his cock with one stroke so savage—the air splits from your ribs with a coughing gasp. It is too difficult to _not_ bend back to the sharp thrust, as your thighs spread and press flush upon his loins. You take him deep, collapsing weak and damnably wet against him. He does not allow you the room to adjust, picking you up into an aggressive rhythm of movement that is new, and is quick to syphon away all other thought. Before mind has time to connect to body, you are already feeding from the growing assault of his measure, driven by the sounds of his broken groans as you squeeze around him as a vise, and ride heightened against each heavy thrust whilst scraping nails into the sweep of his throat. Plain abandon takes precedence over any reason that would scream for you to stop.

Hades never replies to your long forgotten question, seemingly adrift in the moment as everything about his demeanor becomes more unhinged—a deep yearning to the way that he brings you into a kiss that flirts with fierce desperation. Strong fingers fist themselves taut and unforgiving into the hair at your nape, blurring the line between pleasure and pain as he devours your mouth, and pulls you reeling, thrashing along the upward snap of his hips. He steals whimpers from your throat with the fight to match his fervor, the tip of your tongue cresting over the points of teeth that feel much too sharp in the dark. With those teeth he seizes your pout, raring to drag you back no sooner than you can suck in a rushed breath. He pulls you under, under his spell and you do not know where the thought began but you will stop at nothing to follow, and beg not to be saved.

The air is laden thick with his darksome aether, willowy tendrils supple in their search, rolling as velvet smokefall upon your form to set a steep contrast to his rough hold as he fucks you mindless. The feel of it is far too intimate to the very fabric of your aetherial limits, pricking inward in a manner that leaves you awash with immeasurable emotion, pieces of you fondly held and cherished that have not been touched since back when the world was whole. He fills you up so exquisite from the inside, seeps himself into the spaces that only he can fill and almost, it is enough. Almost, as he takes your heart and burns every bridge down behind him, you think it enough. 

But something untapped trembles for more, tunneling down and whelved past every layer of sane, wakeful thought or sentiment. Some lost figment outside of the skin, drawn by rote and cursed from the start. A vicious longing that no one living would know for as dwindled the spirit. 

With claws, it reaches just barely to scratch. A narrow band of blushing radiance draped within your aether, the quiet brush of a summer’s dream along his unsundered soul.

It mesmerises as much as it ruins, though you had left him in tatters long before.

Time stills into a dead pause, an interlude that finds your jaw slack and limbs tangled, perched about your lover and you are heaving for air that cannot come quick enough. Hades’s breath is just as shaken, if not moreso as he haltingly dips his mouth from yours and, for the longest time, he simply rests his damp forehead against your brow with hands nestled into your hair, now in repose but unwilling to let go. You are wrapped snug around the broad expanse of his chest, fingernails sinking ruddy crescents into his shoulder blades, a prettied flourish to pair beside the ragged ribbons of red drawn from erstwhile passion. 

A new sort of intimacy builds in that throbbing stretch of silence, brick by brick as the tip of his aquiline nose grazes over your cheek, his chin tilted so that your lips all but touch. He is gorged within the ache of your sex, deeply pulsing in sync with the torrent of your blood—the sensation becomes more intense than ever as you war with the urge to cave, to raze yourself into him. The wayward sting at your eyelids is maddening, and you can only focus on how cool his third eye feels along such feverish skin in the gathering darkness.

“What have I done?” The whisper sounds from another place, far away. So much that you wonder if it ever had been, even as the implications weigh down on any semblance of composure. 

A shallow tremor ripples through his aether, and hesitation lours as a storm.

You can hear the faint catch of air between his teeth, feel how his brow crinkles in tension just before he speaks. “I have been so damned weak and selfish.” His voice is a rasping cello, and with it a chill that creeps amid the gloom. “It is only that I have waited so very long for this, you see. Searched and waited for the right time, a time that seemed as though it would never come...”

Your heart drops and hangs by a single thread while long fingers begin to loosen and comb with care through your tousled locks. And from burdened breath he hums tender murmurings in ancient tongue across your softly parted lips, feathered onto half-mast lashes and molten along the shell of your ear. He languidly rolls his hips, and you answer with a harsh shiver. It should be worrying, what he says next.

“I cannot lie to you, love. This may bring the both of us pain,” he sighs between sultry kisses, rising in urgency and laced with heady lust. His hands roam and palm at your breasts with a biting possession, turning tightened nipples in a way that makes you _writhe_. “But I _want you_. I _need_ _you_. I need you to _do that again_ , touch me as before and do not think of anything else…” His mouth drifts from yours, ghosting along the line of your jaw to press the softest lips hot and full to the curve of bone. A sinuous curl of tongue, before sucking the fragile skin to bruise. “Think only of how I feel and I will do the rest. Touch me...” His tongue teases over your earlobe, carrying an echo of dark promise. “... and tell me if it hurts.” 

Hades first grasps your hips with little effort to lift you aloft and then seats you down deliciously swift onto his cock, thick and impossibly hard with your loud shriek. He takes over the reins in their entirety and his words have seared themselves beneath your skull. His need becomes your own. You find your chin nodding away into the otherworldly shadows, mouthing consent in wheezed outbreath because coherent speech will not come when he begins to _move_. 

“Focus on me, angel. Just you and me... let me show you...” There is a restless quaver within the supplication, and the sound of his own weakness is too much. The way his control shreds to the last word, silken smooth murmur dismantling into a starved growl as you clench down around him.

You twine your hands through his hair, wrenching him back by the base of his skull and _gods_ , how you wish you could see him crumble with the loose heave of his chest. He in turn plagues you with long and precise strokes, drawing away to leave you nigh empty before plunging in relentless, the ends of which you struggle to meet as he dips far and then further still into your drenched sex. It is all you can do to cling to his words riddled with runes that run hushed from his lips, while you squeeze onto each ilm that scales your insides and brushes full along the spot that steals every care, save for him. 

You cannot notice as he flips you flat on your back, how the darkness starts to pull and bend in on itself—shadows peeling from the dim stretch of light that dances about such lofty windows, framing the eidolon of a fallen flashing city. As he works your body with his, caressing places no one has reached before, the ties between unfurl into something other than what could be measured by lucid thought. Water films your eyes when you hang on him to follow, as his thumb traces slick little spirals over your swollen pearl and you can taste the blood from your lips, badly bruised by his and your own teeth. A nameless power from another breadth of existence, it tugs ferocious through his aether as it pulls you apart gasping in his hands, and the stabbing sobs that chase your soft moans—you feel you’ve been gutted, yet so _warm_ all the same… both losing and finding yourself in turns. 

“Hades, I’m going to… I can’t—” 

Your small voice becomes choked back when he leans down to draw your bottom lip in to taste, pinning one of your knees sky-high over his shoulder while sucking hotly on the torn flesh. “Do not hold back,” he demands with vehemence against your gaping mouth, a spark of danger invoked in his tone that destroys. “ _Let go for me_.” 

You shudder unbridled beneath him, a visceral reflex bested by the strong arm that circles around your waist, pulling you close again to his chest to where you now _know_ his heart beats just as fast as yours, and all as he hooks his hips in such a way that he drives you under and undone. Your head swings back like a broken doll with hair swept wild and eyes wide open, runaway aether on fire as you shake apart and he becomes your only anchor to this world. Every sound that flows from your throat thereafter is swallowed by his tongue while he kisses you as though it would be his last.

It is then, when your mind falls again, that you should think to stop. When the energy in the space between begins to snap and ignite into something else altogether. Instead you choose to forget, the both of you allowing the tide to drag order and circumstance to naught, swinging into an old dance of fools.

Before you can gather your wits, you are pressing Hades down below you with a forceful purpose. His abdomen spasms against your palms with hitched breath, holding ground for a scant moment of clarity. There is a change in you, uncut and brought to life as it crawls under your skin, swims through your veins and you think that Hades must feel this too. If only you could better see his face in the tenebrous scape of the room, you would see the mix of hope mingled with despair, the solace at war with every doubt you will never be able to imagine. But he goes willingly as you draw your heels at the small of his back and begin to rock into a slow and punishing pace for the both of you. The noises that coil from your breast are high-pitched and strangled things as he torques his hips to meet and lunge into that perfect arc, with chin thrown back and firm fingers splayed fast into your thighs to push blossoms of damask and ruby.

The tendons of his neck thrum as he groans, a rich sound of rolling thunder which returns a stark frisson of heat to pool down your navel. You hang your spine forward, twisting the digits of your grip to knot into soft tresses before running your mouth over his throat, chasing the raw pull of cartilage. Your reward is the most tantalising hiss driven from his teeth, followed by a muttered string of expletives as you bite down with a desire that floods past any former reluctance. Husky laughter escapes between his name and his blood on your lips as you rise and continue to ride him to rush that next peak, not knowing whence it came—this vestigial ache sprouting up in your bones. Alien as much as it is kindred, blown beyond any realm of reason.

A thin voice at the back of your skull, it laments how far you have fallen, of how you have dropped into depths you have no perception of running from. The skin on your face cracks from the weight of dried tears, hooded eyes straining against the force that a fresh set will bring. Hades lies reverent and rapt underneath you, and the wish seethes itself through your heart that you had not played pretend for so long. That you had run to him sooner, if only just to have a little more time...

_(because there will never be enough time.)_

And as your Ascian, Emet-Selch—Hades clutches fast onto the pliant flesh of your throat, clamps forefinger and thumb like steel to the crux of jawbone, dragging your face down to meet his in the faintest slip of a kiss—you fear you do not care as you should, about whatever lies outside of these walls, the bloodied fray on the other side of the dream, those protean variables you could never quite grasp to begin with. As his volition melds with yours, smudging theory into truth, something curled along the chaos of your aether reaches out just as before, unbidden and calm. 

With it comes light, tumbling down into darkness.

.

.

.

_“Hades!”_

The name claws itself out and warbles as an echo—a lulling revenant’s chord between the ears, spun by the angels.

A warped softness wraps over as a thick nebula, paralysing to the senses. For however poorly you can see in the chamber, the world only grows more black and formless, then tilts from below. Drifts of winter, like the frosty drafts swept from the rugged crags of Coerthas, they sweep the torrid sweat from your skin, skin that peels away like gossamer petals and leaves of moondust. As if you have been pulled and torn from your body—your soul, a swirling pith of boundless blue flame suspended and free. You gather that you have felt something akin to this, though not painful as before with the cut of diseased white. Inky shadow swathes around as a soft cloak and it is spellbinding, how much peace comes with the void. 

But then something lurches from within, a swelling pressure tugging not unlike a rope of sorts. It is familiar, inexplicably so as it twists and you follow blind through towards the end. Only to falter when the feelings catch themselves into a snarl—a slow trickle of honesty that you have long ignored, so wound up in your current prison of misery and introspection. 

From where the feelings come, you’ve no clue at first in your disorientation—they seem your own. And they only gain strength the further you go, surging as waves of astral midnight into the warmth of your soul, marrying with your light. A repining for what has been taken, pillaged by misfortune—of halcyon afternoons spent in the sun with laughter and the darling songs woven from birds that could not fly fast enough to evade the wrath of their makers. A veiled rage just beneath—of every nescient breath snuffed out with the endless rot of over ten thousand years to bring them all back, bring your sundered brethren back to walk a land sown with the stunted bones of children. Beyond that, still more than aught else, a total eclipse of desolation—a blistering sort of loneliness, the torture overwrought from no one to truly turn to, _no one to hold_ while everything you know has become replaced with a shadow of what once was. No recognition from the severed souls of those you once debated with, those you once shared ideas and discoveries and dreams of the future—long ago buried when the sky shattered and unleashed unspeakable horror over your home. No love to spare but for a sleeping god whose chains bind as naught more than bitter penance and an all-consuming obsession to reforge the star hale and whole again, a dormant figure to store belief and blame in so that the passing years of decline and suffering do not feel for nothing, _all of that blood harvested for nothing_.

The ache of it narrows to the point that it bursts all other bubbles of perception, that your fingers tremble wild with power to maintain purchase—the only other thing your being can process, to touch down to a solid plane and prove that you are not going insane as these feelings, _his feelings_ become one with your own. They manifest into the eldritch, slowly picking and tearing and ravaging you piece by piece, until you hear your name—not your name given in this existence, but the other—a deafening roar of a scream that sounds like Death itself... 

**_Persephone!_ **

And you see without eyes.

His soul, shining in an endless drop of starlit obsidian. Flames of crimson and amaranthine, streaked with aurum into a bleeding disc of a sun, they branch and sway over as tall reeds trailing the depths of an aphotic sea. The very edges singe into a gentle gleam, something seen in the past but now made transparent. Each colour flushes more vibrant than the last, although you lack the sight to know what’s reflected in his eyes as he takes in the sundrenched cerulean of your soul. As he becomes engulfed in your light, all you want for is to curl and become lost in his darkness. It is home, more love than you have ever known magnified upon your aura and bequeathing life, a purpose, a dream worth your undoing if that must be the price.

In this moment, if there is such a concept of time between bonded souls, the tethers binding you to the corporeal are now threadbare as a muffled humming rises and then falls as the turn of the tide. Your breath is cut short and that small voice in your head sighs as a frail whisper for you to _let go_ , no matter _how much you do not want to_. No matter that you’ve only just found a warm fireside after a life of searching the mountains, skies, forests, deserts, oceans for the answer of why you still wake up to face your nightmares each day. So you do not listen, ever so determined to meet Hades somewhere in the middle, even as his gnarled soul pours into you and splits you from the inside out. It is worth it, he is worth more than the suffering that tangles and snares into the paradise. You will have it all, his _everything_. This is what your being howls as it holds fast, though you’ve no idea and he realises the mishap too late, that you have drawn your claws much more deep than expected.

And it is wondrously devastating when his essence becomes one with your own, as your souls fully touch as though for the first time, brushing past cobwebs to wrap as starcrossed lovers in the night. For such a different set of circumstances than last you met, riven or wrought by providence, it is not far from being so. The onslaught of pain is fated, a raging spate of grief abrading your senses as you feel the first fringes of countless lifetimes rife with exile and execution, coiling en masse into the tether that twines your soul to his. A scathing taste of his past, a forever without you and—

Hades shoves away violently, knocking you back as a parallel between both soul and flesh. It comes as a wicked, tempestuous gale ripped from thin air, though no amount of his force would help to deny your suspicions when you glimpse at the translucid trails of violet and raven, draped as a silent embrace… still set aglow by soft radiance, the first blades of dawn peeking against the black silk of a burial shroud. 

.

.

.

All that is heard is the loud thudding pulse in your head, mingled with scant breath into the quiet. It is unknown as to when you were driven upward, braced on bent knees before Hades along the mussed maze of sheets. Your lips are pressed to his, strange in that the touch is so soft while he tightens his hold unsparing against your throat in one hand as the other grazes down the dip of your waist, smoothing fingers to shape over the rounded swell of your ass. Your heart quickens and the appalling amount of _dripping_ _wet_ between and smeared down your shifting thighs makes your face smoulder. 

His caress is measured and tinged with a firm undernote of hunger, an avarice coloured in the way his grasp feels like edged talons cut into your flesh, in the way he visibly struggles to curb his strength from crunching your pelvis into him. This is all before he swiftly hikes your thigh up to hook low around his abdomen, his skin hot and slick with sweat and sex just as yours. His arousal, primed and pressed so heavily at your aching cunt. Your eyes spring open with a little gasp into his mouth, much too soon caged by the rich glaze of amber. It takes a disturbing amount of time for you to register how it is you are able to see him so clear before you now, pulling back slightly and unable to look away.

His pale irises capture the warm glow filling the chamber, thrown from the candles which are again blazing just as the hearth to the far side of the bed. The longer you hold his gaze, shafts of tinseled light breach into stagnant corners of your mind, and a humbling thought breaks the surface. Your stomach turns and your blood scalds that the flesh could nigh split and fall from bone. A dim purpose is gathered in what he meant when he spake of your soul that day at the Ladder, before less explicitly in the Ocular. Raw sentiments, stripped and laid bare from the reckless pursuit of his waiting for you, of a soul to endure the _necessary pain_. 

“You’ve suffered eternity for me to become strong enough...” Your lips move with the words, staring into his eyes like open windows and so far flown away that you do not hear them. The next ones drag from behind your teeth, bereft of hope. “But I think we both know that I am not... and he... he still has your soul, twisted about his finger as if nothing has changed.” 

There is no instant revelation imparted from how he returns your bleary wet stare, that some great curtain has been drawn on high. That you are at the cusp of knowing the secret that will shower down the truth from the heavens, to smooth over every difference in your separate crooked paths and mayhap, just once—there could be a happily ever after. Of course not, and it is absurd to expect as much. There is no room for faerie tales among the kind of monsters that dwell within your world. 

Instead, an inenarrable form of melancholia steeps about the space, with how you hold one another a little closer. In his jewelled eyes as he kisses a lone tear that trails down your cheek, and with the fleeting flash of dark conflict that storms there in his expression just before doing so. How his brow furrows, vermilion lips falling open with no sound as the ghost inside chokes back his tongue. There is a short spell of silence, and then a breathy sort of chuckle pulls shallow from his chest, the chafing peal of spent leaves thrust from dying trees in autumn. It is at once startling and a part of you dies inside to hear its mirth, belied by the hurt that reverberates against your soul. 

“We are going to have to do something about all of this weeping, love,” Hades says with a tender brush of heat over your skin, whilst lying you carefully down into the misshapen sheets below. His intense scrutiny envelops you in a fog, and you cannot fight back the sigh when next he speaks with such quiet sincerity, the wistfulness painting his expression. “While I admit that I do find you insufferably dazzling this way, I’d much prefer to see your smile.”

Butterflies rattle at your insides and lying back in bed does not help matters as you would initially think. As soon as your head hits crumpled silk, the essence of meadows in rainstorms—an aroma of sweet nectar and building dew floods your nostrils, redolent and when you turn your chin, you see the fair curved petals amid crisp fronds of jade. You have not the time to take in their beauty, feeling broad hands fold around your ankles and tug you to the edge of the bed. The cool tickle of grass sweeping up your shoulders makes your bones shiver as you catch the view of the ceiling above—the unbroken night, lit by strange stars rolling into black sapphire. 

“Where are—wh-what is...”

Your unfinished question hangs in the honeyed air while Hades runs his tongue down your chest, pausing his descent to suckle and tease at the stiffening tips of your breasts, worrying at far too sensitive flesh between perfect teeth. His mouth is hot and messy, insistent with the kisses he branches out to your navel, then slows down in swirling and dipping his tongue inside—a perverse show of a gesture that makes your knees flex, bunching up your spine in response. You reach for his unruly mane of hair, carding into the silk as he gropes at your hipbones outward to your backside and, with such anxiety, you struggle desperately between shoving his face into your sex and forcing him away altogether.

“Tell me to stop,” he offers as if to read, then challenge your thoughts, soft lips dragging by the ilm on down. You freeze to his smug imposition, the seemingly nefarious motives he parlays when sinking to his knees at the fall of the bed, between your spread thighs with the fire from the marbled hearth behind. 

It feels that every muscle seizes to stone at the picture of him, limned by flame with shadows tracing over the carven hollows of his face, fringed by wild waves of wine spun with snow. How those bangs rest rakish over polished brows, the pure abandon shaping his every aspect into something destructive to your inhibitions. Your mouth runs dry as the moist heat of his breath flutters over your folds, as he hooks one knee over his shoulder and then nuzzles the sensitive span of your inner thigh. His mouth advances ravenous over the softness there, dappling a sensuous path to your apex.

“Tell me and I can end this now.” He pauses his attentions, the pale gold in his eyes casting tiny threads of light into your retinas. “I can send you back and crush this memory. I’d do it for you...” and it is as if it pains him to speak these things even as he kisses you with such affection. 

“But I must confess that I could never truly leave you be...” This last bit surrenders from his lips like a blown candle against your skin, holding the wick with its life before vanishing. 

It prickles unforeseen at the back of your mind—a nagging notion, a stringent resonance plucked from this moment upon your comprehension. You forget to breathe as you watch him, watch him as his tongue slips down your slit to tease you apart just as a maelstrom of emotion pulls over when you see that familiar gleam, a nuanced filigree to the penumbra of his bloodsoaked soul. _Your_ light, imbued within. Then still, the explicit devotion smote through such sad, lovely eyes as he brings you to heaven again. Or a beautiful construct of hell, for you have trouble telling the difference anymore.

“No, you could never escape me. Just as I, you...” he hums into your wetness with something of a snarl, tongue soothing at the swollen hot center of you. Everything you are falls away at the seams to the feel of him, as he fucks you with his mouth and his hands come to bear down at the wide swing of your hips, dwarfing your strength all too easy. Your fingers curl into the sheets, or so you think until soft lilac flowers turn up twisted into your palms and you are crying _yet_ _again_ and you’ve no idea why but laughter bursts free between the tears.

“I would lay my life down for you, my Persephone. _My goddess..._ ” 

What he says speaks to your soul, such simple words and his long tongue thrusts deep as you sing his name to the dead flowers spread flowing along your skin. You flex your leg rigid around his back to gather him close as his right hand has found your left, lacing through your fingers and pressed to frayed petals, lush tufts of grass and delicate fern. His praise, his ardor, his _worship_ —its shadow surrounds you just as your light has done for him. It strikes its chord with a force like no other and you know now that despite the chains that bind, there is a power greater. 

The room has all but fallen into an asylum of opulent bloom and greenery by the time that Hades has crawled up your body, lain out across an altar of lilac and creamy jasmine. He slings your ankles around lean muscled hips to enter you in earnest, mouth buried into your hair, purring sweet little nothings that make your heart swell up tight against your ribs. His rhythm becomes irregular, ragged with every slap of flesh, every sharp contraction of your sex that only pulls him further in, making him undone for you. In no time, you are pushed past your own threshold as he rolls onto his back and has you straddling him with little grace and all fever to the motion. Your shoulders toss backward with a howl when his thumb flicks and sweeps down at your pulsing clit, and the thick flared tip of him brushes full over that tender inmost tract of nerve endings. He follows right behind in your crashing fall, bucking beneath with a handful of rough strokes before rising to wrap his arms full around you, muffling a hoarse moan that blossoms heat like smoke into your skin. His lips, pressed trembling upon the valley between your breasts as you milk him dry and whine out his name in tandem. You hold him there as his warmth spills inside your womb, gentle nails sifting through disheveled strands of burgundy and moonlight—a waft of lavender, that gesture brings when you drift your mouth to his third eye and relish in how his breath softly catches in response.

Your thumb skates over the tapered stud of his pearled earring, that leftover trinket you’d spared little thought heretofore. And the words come unbidden, too large to be held back while an image forms in your mind, of a time when you made a promise to the soul pressed so snug to yours. A whispered oath never to leave, and a confession of a corrosive sort of love, a love that you knew would devastate the both of you. A love that would be given and taken regardless of its pain and its sacrifice, no matter the higher power that stood at the crossroads.

“This was mine.” It is spoken against his cheek as you roll the fine pearl between the tips of your fingers, admiring the attractive swirl of rainbow. There is no doubt in your voice, and Hades pulls from you, canting his disconcerted gaze up to meet yours just when next you say, “ ** _You_ ** _are mine_.” 

By the returned light of the fire (no flowers to be found), the corner of his lips curl into a most damaging smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update is a very long time coming. I lack excuses, other than my horrible knack for procrastination hit me like a train. Well, that and a good ole case of writer's block. I do apologize, and hope to post more regularly. 
> 
> Please bear in mind that my ideas on tempering are a bit less black and white. Of course, it has a great impact on the soul but is routed through emotional conflict and bends towards one's intrinsic aspirations/morals in life. I believe the unsundered can sway their own judgment to a large degree, but that their penance is used against them and ultimately drives them along. Otherwise, I do not feel that Hades could have reached out like he did in-game without repercussions. This story exaggerates upon that theory, and hopefully I'm beginning to convey in this chapter how love can throw a wrench into anything.


End file.
